Religion, Education and Post-Modernity

Religion, Education and Post-modernity

This book, the ¢rst to explore religious education and post-modernity in depth, sets out to provide a much needed examination of the problems and possibilities post-modernity raises for religious education. At once a general introduction to this topic and a distinctive contribution to the debate in its own right, Religion, Education and Post-modernity explores and illuminates the problems and possibilities opened up for religious education by post-modern thought and culture. The book describes the emergence of post-modernity, considers the impact of post-modernity on religion, addresses its impact on the philosophy of religion and considers the nature of religious education in the post-modern world. Andrew Wright argues that, although post-modernity has much to o¡er the religious educator, there are also many pitfalls and dangers to be avoided. Steering clear of the extreme of post-modern hyper-realism, he constructs a religious pedagogy sensitive to post-modern concerns for alterity, di¡erence and the voice of the Other, whilst insisting on the importance of reason in cultivating religious literacy. Dr. Andrew Wright is Senior Lecturer in Religious and Theological Education at King's College, London. He is also Chair of the Association of University Lecturers in Religion and Education.

Religion, Education and Post-modernity

Andrew Wright

First published 2004 by RoutledgeFalmer 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by RoutledgeFalmer 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004.

RoutledgeFalmer is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group & 2004 Andrew Wright All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record has been requested ISBN 0-203-46349-8 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-47166-0 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0^415^29870^9 (Print edition)

For Jonathan, Heather and Angela

Clearly the Divine Comedy of our time must counter the `nothing' of modern nihilism with more than continuance. Ulrich Simon, Sitting in Judgement, 147 E voi, mortali, tenetevi stretti a giudicar . . . ( Judge, then, you mortals with restraint . . .)

Dante, Paradiso, xx, 133

Contents

Preface 1 The enigma of post-modernity PART I

Philosophy

ix 1

9

2 The legacy of modernity

10

3 Post-modern foundations

23

4 Alterity and anti-realism

37

5 The promise of critical realism

52

PART II

Theology

67

6 Deconstructing modern theology

69

7 Radical a/theology

82

8 The mystery of the world

96

9 Religious orthodoxy revisited

109

viii

Contents

PART III

Education

125

10 Modern pedagogy

127

11 Postpedagogy

141

12 Border pedagogy

154

13 Critical pedagogy

166

PART IV

Religious education

179

14 Modern religious education

181

15 Deconstructing religious education

195

16 Transcendence and transformation

208

17 Critical religious education

220

Bibliography Index

232 244

Preface

The nominalist contention that the relationship between language and reality is entirely arbitrary is, I believe, misplaced: the stories we tell and the life-styles we adopt enjoy a rich synergetic relationship with the world we indwell. This is not to suggest that the narratives through which we order our lives are necessarily correct; merely that it would appear to make sense to seek out stories that are as truthful to the actual order-of-things as possible. During my time as a classroom teacher I became aware that a number of my pupils had learnt to make key life-changing decisions on the basis of a distinctive, if largely implicit, romantic narrative that identi¢es intensity of feeling as the basic criterion for any choice of action. This left me uneasy, both because intensity of feeling seemed to me to be a particularly fragile foundation on which to base one's life, and because the commitment to romanticism ruled out a range of alternative options. I entered the world of academia to discover that many religious educators had themselves bought wholesale into the romantic myth, and were busy advocating the cultivation of spiritual sensibility as a means of establishing the legitimacy and relevance of religious education in the curriculum. Consequently over a ¢ve-year period I sought to develop a critical approach to spiritual education designed to cast doubt on the provenance of an experientially based religious pedagogy, open up other potential horizons of meaning, and empower students to take responsibility for their spiritual lives by cultivating appropriate levels of religious literacy (Wright 1996a, 1996b, 1997a, 1997b, 1998a, 1988b, 1999, 2000a, 2000b). During that period I was happy to dismiss post-modernity as little more than a radicalisation of the romantic tradition: just as romanticism invited children to trust their inner experiences, so post-modernity went a stage further by encouraging children to construct their own ¢ctional realities on the basic of their personal desires, preferences and inclinations. I did not, at that stage, anticipate engaging in any more detailed examination of post-modern philosophy. Two factors changed my mind. The ¢rst was the

x

Preface

realisation that a shift from romanticism to post-modernity was gradually gathering pace in the world of religious education. The second was an ongoing series of conversations with two good friends and sparring partners: Clive Erricker and Fernando Gros persuaded me, independently of one another, of the need to take a fresh look at post-modernity, and to approach it with a greater gravitas than I had previously thought necessary. As my research gathered pace it became clear that post-modernity challenges us to rethink the traditional ways in which we understand education, and that, as suspected, religious education is not immune to this process. Despite being pleasantly surprised at my positive response to many aspects of post-modern philosophy I also found many of my reservations surrounding attempts to reformulate religious education in post-modern terms con¢rmed. My wrestling with the various problems and possibilities post-modernity raises for religious education has borne fruit in this book. I began writing under the shadow of the cataclysmic events that shook the United States of America on 11 September 2001, and found myself completing it as the war in Iraq gave way to a fragile and uncertain quest for peace and justice in the middle east. Though I did not set out to write with the developing international situation in mind, it increasingly formed an implicit counterpoint to the emerging text. Post-modernity is primarily a discourse about di¡erence, and the way we learn to acknowledge and respond to religious di¡erence is of vital importance to the future of humanity. Religion, Education and Post-Modernity is intended to providing both a general introduction to the topic and a distinctive contribution to the ongoing academic debate. It sets out to unpack the nature of post-modernity, investigate its impact on religion and theology, explore its signi¢cance for education, and propose ways forward for religious education in our post-modern world. The core argument is driven by a concern to cultivate a public religious literacy through which our all-too-human comedy of errors can be taken up and viewed sub specie aeternitatis, as part of an ambiguous yet vitally important divina commedia. Post-modernity, it seems to me, has enormous potential both to facilitate and seriously hamper this task. Fernando Gros was one of four colleagues generous enough to ¢nd the time to read and comment on the penultimate draft of the manuscript; the others were Philip Barnes at the University of Ulster, Anta Filipsone at the University of Latvia, and my colleague William Kay at King's College London. I was able to explore some of my developing ideas at meetings of the Association of University Lecturers in Religion and Education (UK), the International Seminar of Religious Education and Values, and at a seminar held in the Theological Faculty of the University of Latvia in Riga. I continue to reap the bene¢ts of learning, teaching and researching in the vibrant and challenging environment provided by the Centre for Theology,

Preface

xi

Religion and Culture at King's College London, and am especially grateful for the support of my colleagues there: Anne-Marie Brandom, William Kay, Mike Poole, Andrew Walker, Pete Ward, and my sister Angela Wright. I am also deeply indebted to ongoing conversations with a number of my doctoral students, most notably Jo Backus, Janet Brannigan-Croggon, Chris Collingwood, Rosemary Cox, Ciro Genovese, Neil Hopkin, Teck-Peng Lim, Laura Musker, Viv Thomas, Kerry Thorpe and Tony Wenman. My deepest debt of gratitude however is, as ever, owed to Jacqueline, Rebecca and Elizabeth, who continue to tutor an admittedly rather slow learner in that true wisdom which passes all human understanding. Andrew Wright Easter 2003

Acknowledgement

An earlier version of Chapter 15 appeared as `Dancing in the Fire: A Deconstruction of Clive Erricker's Post-Modern Spiritual Pedagogy' in Religious Education 96, 1: 120^35, copyright 2001, reproduced by permission of Taylor & Francis, Inc. www.routledge-ny.com.

Chapter 1

The enigma of post-modernity

We begin with modernity: speci¢cally the Enlightenment's attempt to discover and describe the natural order-of-things. This was achieved, at least in part, by classifying, ordering and calibrating the three distinctive domains of nature: the animal, the vegetable and the mineral. Carl Linnaeus, the eighteenth-century founder of modern taxonomy ^ the science of the classi¢cation of living and extinct organisms ^ divided the animal kingdom into vertebrates and invertebrates. He further sub-divided vertebrates into ¢sh, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals, on the basis of criteria such as skeletal structure, outer covering, means of reproduction and methods of temperature control. This biological classi¢cation does not, of course, constitute the ¢nal word on animals. It is quite possible to establish alternative organisational principles: a taxonomy of animals in relation to human beings, for example, might result in distinctions being drawn between wild and domesticated animals, between those that pose a threat to human life and those that do not, and between animals kept as pets, as working animals and for food. It is also clear ^ as the example of Andrew Linzey's monograph Animal Theology demonstrates ^ that such taxonomies constitute merely one of a number of possible ways through which we can arrive at a deeper understanding of the animal kingdom (Linzey 1994). Nevertheless the classi¢catory process clearly provided the disciples of modernity with a useful scienti¢c starting point in their attempts to make sense of the animal world. Now let's introduce post-modernity into the discussion. The Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges has chosen to follow an agenda clearly worlds apart from the modern desire to order and control reality. In his books real and ¢ctitious characters intermingle without comment as he constructs imaginary worlds marked by ambiguity, uncertainty and contradiction in a language distinctive in its cyclical, labyrinthine and dreamlike qualities. He describes an (imaginary?) Chinese encyclopaedia whose approach to taxonomy is as far apart from that of Linnaeus as can be imagined: animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f ) fabulous, (g) stray dogs,

2

Religion, education and post-modernity

(h) included in the present classi¢cation, (i) frenzied, ( j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very ¢ne camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way o¡ look like £ies. (Borges 1964: 103) It goes without saying that this classi¢cation breaks all the rules of order and structure familiar to modern science: biology students are not going to pick up too many marks if they draw on it in their examinations. What are the grounds for dividing the animal kingdom into sucking pigs, stray dogs and ^ presumably ^ all other animals? Why the reference to animals that from a long way o¡ look like £ies? Why not those which might be mistaken for trees or people? It is not that we struggle to make sense of the logic underlying the classi¢cation: there is simply no logic at work here at all, nothing at all to suggest that the list is anything other than a entirely arbitrary one. Perhaps the best we can do is to suggest that it reads rather like the response of an infant to the question `What di¡erent kinds of animals do you know?' In which case we are faced with nothing more than a pre-scienti¢c stream of consciousness £owing from the mind of someone who has not even begun to understand the basic rules of classi¢cation. Michael Foucault places Borges' list at the beginning of his post-modern study The Order of Things, in which he attempts to deconstruct the distinctively modern forms of the disciplines of the natural and human sciences (Foucault 1974). He applauds the Chinese encyclopaedia because it transgresses our comfortable habits of reasoning, deconstructs `all the familiar landmarks of my thought', and breaks up `all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things' (xv). Is Foucault onto something here? Is there some deeper signi¢cance beyond the obvious cleverness, irony, humour and wit? Is he o¡ering a profound post-modern insight that challenges the received `truths' of modernity, thereby emancipating us from the tyranny of science and opening up the possibility of recovering a sense of playfulness through which we might learn to see the world in a myriad of di¡erent ways? Or is this mere pseudoscience, a pre-modern taxonomy best dismissed as a vestige from some primitive past? It is probable that our response to the questions raised by the Chinese encyclopaedia will re£ect our evaluation of post-modernity as a whole. There are many who view the movement as intellectually moribund and bankrupt, a fashionable rhetoric devoid of any genuine substance or lasting value, destined to fade away just as quickly as it emerged. Others ¢nd in post-modernity a de¢ning epoch in western thought just as profound and signi¢cant as the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, a paradigm shift in intellectual and spiritual sensibility from which there can be no turning back. The implications of both sets of responses, both generally for the way we make sense of the world and speci¢cally for our understanding of the

The enigma of post-modernity

3

interface between religion and education, are profound. How are we to respond to the enigma of post-modernity? Is the post-modern emperor wearing clothes? Or is he naked?

The contours of post-modernity Post-modernity is embedded in the growing public awareness of the reality of cultural diversity. The rapid growth of communications technology, coupled with the increasing intrusion of the media into our lives, has forced us to broaden our horizons in ways that would have been di¤cult to imagine even a few decades ago. Given the plurality of choices and options before us, it is increasingly di¤cult to make sense of a diverse and complex world. This has led, perhaps inevitably, to the collapse of a single shared high culture and its fragmentation into a diverse range of popular cultures. The ensuing sense of unease and craving for security in the face of rapid change has lead to the rehabilitation of local concerns, traditions and communities within which we seek to ¢nd a home. Our freedom to pick and mix our cultural choices, on the basis of our parochial experiences and individual desires, needs and wishes, is seen by some to mark the dubious triumph of the immediacy of ephemeral fashion over tradition and substance, while for others it is a cause for celebration, opening up a range of options and possibilities previously unavailable to us. The post-modern implosion of traditional hierarchies of order and meaning has led to a £attening out of critical judgement. We consume culture not because we perceive it as possessing any intrinsic value, but simply because it is attractive and useful to us, capable of feeding our needs and satiating our desires. Modern musicology, for example, established a pantheon of classical composers who, by virtue of a combination of inspiration, innate ability and hard-earned craftsmanship, forged for themselves a place in the canon of musical genius: Monteverdi, Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, supported by a cast of lesser ¢gures. The art of classical composition was deemed intrinsically superior to lesser, more popular, musical forms and traditions: folk, jazz, pop, rap, rock, soul and so forth. The value of the latter was assumed to be severely limited, though not to be dismissed out of hand: Bartok, for example, was one of many classical composers who drew inspiration from traditional folk music; but then again, Messiaen drew similar inspiration from bird song. At the end of the day a clear line of demarcation was drawn between serious classical music and the frivolities of popular music. Post-modern culture dissolves this demarcation line: Abba are placed alongside Allegri, Susana Baca alongside J.S. Bach, John Coltrane alongside Chopin, the Dixie Chicks alongside Debussy, Eminem alongside Elgar. In post-modern culture all musical forms are thrown into a common melting pot, and the selection from the plurality of musical culture takes place on the basis of personal preference rather than any perceived musical value.

4

Religion, education and post-modernity

BBC Radio 3, long a key bastion of western classical music, re£ects this postmodern economy: on weekday evenings the classical repertoire is suspended as the presenters of Late Junction o¡er a `laid-back, eclectic mix of music from across the globe, ranging from Mali to Bali, and from medieval chant to 21st-century electronica' (BBCi Music 2003). This collapsing of received hierarchies has led to attempts to dissolve the very boundaries and frameworks within which such hierarchies operate. Not content merely with questioning the classi¢cation of music, literature and religion, this quintessentially post-modern move seeks to deconstruct the very currency of labels such as `music', `literature' and `religion'. Aspects of post-modern art, for example, are deliberately transgressive, setting out to disrupt our comfortable notions of what exactly constitutes `art'. Tracey Emin's My Bed formed part of her 1997^8 installation Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made. Originally shown at the Kunstverein in Cologne, and later short-listed for the Tate Gallery's 1999 Turner Prize, My Bed is simply that: Emin's bed, unmade and scattered with the kind of objects and artefacts one might expect to ¢nd in the bedroom of a self-consciously avante garde twenty-¢ve-year-old woman. Similar transgressions include the work of the English performance artist Stuart Brisley who spent a week immersed in a bath containing o¡al and other animal parts, the French artist Giana Pane who performed a series of `psychic actions' during which she slashed her body with a razor blade, and the Italian Piero Manzoni whose 1961 work Merda d'Artista consisted of a (mercifully) sealed tin of his own excrement (Lucie-Smith 1999: 128¡ ). Similar attempts to challenge traditional categories are to be found in the ¢eld of music. In 2001 the San Francisco duo Drew Daniel and Martin Schmidt released, under the moniker Matmos, an album of electronic soundscapes: A Chance to Cut is A Chance to Cure. It consists of a collage of sound recordings of cosmetic surgery, including liposuction, laser eye treatment, and the cauterisation of muscle tissue (Matmos 2001). More famously the American composer John Cage's interest in randomness and indeterminacy led to his practice of tossing coins to establish the musical pitch of some of his compositions; amongst his better-known works is the 1952 opus 4'33'' which consists ^ quite literally ^ of four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence. This eclectic mix of humour, irony, playfulness, eccentricity, blandness, profundity, decadence, nihilism, masochism and deliberate transgression certainly sets out to disturb, uproot and challenge our received cultural taxonomies. It remains unclear whether history will treat these new cultural prophets with reverence or disdain. Post-modern philosophers were quick to recognise that the collapsing of hierarchies and challenging of traditional cultural forms is closely related to questions of power and authority. The modern university library, for example, was established as a receptacle of universal knowledge and wisdom, classi¢ed and ordered by an appropriate referencing system, structured

The enigma of post-modernity

5

according to modern hierarchies and boundaries of meaning, and demanding of its users critical engagement, informed analysis and balanced judgement. Entry into the library, both for texts and readers, is carefully controlled, policed and monitored. Academic books must get past the scrutiny of publisher's readers and academic sta¡ if they are to be included, and learned articles in academic journals are subjected to close peer review. Borges's Chinese encyclopaedia would certainly not gain access to the biology section, though it may well ¢nd an important place on the ¢ction shelves. Contrast the modern university library with the standard post-modern source of knowledge: the world wide web. Readers have unrestricted entry, provided they have the use to an on-line computer, a modicum of technical skill, and in certain situations a valid credit card. There are no criteria for the inclusion and/or exclusion of sites on the web, the only exception being a small number of restrictions resulting from successful legal challenges and court orders. Policing is extremely di¤cult ^ the occasional prosecution of members of child pornography rings presumably being merely the tip of a much larger iceberg ^ though it is possible to restrict access to certain sites through so-called `parental controls'. Generally speaking, however, order and classi¢cation on the web is minimal, if not non-existent. A number of search engines o¡er loose forms of classi¢cation, though this normally functions simply through their ability to recognise individual words and word clusters regardless of any inherent meaning. As such the web o¡ers an almost restriction-free access to an ever-changing wealth of knowledge, information, data and images. The dramatic increase in freedom and choice brings with it a potentially anarchic implosion of meaning. Unless I have been well educated my engagement with the web is likely to be arbitrary and accidental, the result of idle browsing driven by a mixture of accident and desire.

The task ahead It is against this enigmatic cultural background that our exploration of the interface between religion, education and post-modernity will be conducted. Though the impact of post-modern culture on our lives is impossible to avoid, our response to it remains a matter of individual choice and collective responsibility. In the following chapters we will address philosophical, theological and educational questions to post-modernity in an attempt to better understand the phenomenon and unpack its implications for the enterprise of religious education. Part I o¡ers a distinctive philosophical interpretation of post-modernity. Chapter 2 characterises modernity as an attempt to establish, in the face of a threatened descent into nihilism, an ordered world rooted in three foundational meta-narratives: naturalism, romanticism and liberalism. Chapter 3 draws on the work of Lyotard, Derrida and Foucault to throw light on the foundations and presuppositions underpinning post-modern attempts to

6

Religion, education and post-modernity

deconstruct the edi¢ce of modernity. Chapter 4 identi¢es two distinct brands of post-modernity: a sceptical anti-realistic philosophy associated with Baudrillard's contention that we are free to create our own ¢ctional hyper-realities; and an alteristic philosophy related to Levinas' claim that, since we are unable to fully understand reality, we ought to cultivate a spirit of openness towards di¡erence and the voice of the `Other'. Chapter 5 backtracks a little, suggesting that the post-modern attack on modernity has been only partially successful, and examining ways in which critical realism has sought to rejuvenate the legacy of modernity. The discussion draws the conclusion that the straight choice between modernity and post-modernity is an unnecessary one: the modern philosophy of critical realism and post-modern philosophy of alterity may be brought together in creative synergy. So long as we respect the inherent mystery of the order-of-things, and learn to recognise the limits of human reason, we are free to continue the age-old search for ultimate meaning and truth. Part II addresses theological questions. Its aim is not to generate a de¢nitive interpretation of religion, but rather to explore the interface between theology and post-modernity in order to map out the themes and issues that religious education will need to address. Chapter 6 explores ways in which orthodox religious traditions have been accommodated and domesticated within modern modes of thought. Chapter 7 outlines how post-modern a/theology has re-envisaged religion by rejecting the transcendental truth claims of traditional religious belief systems and utilising the heritage of religious sign, symbol and story as the basis for the creation of a series of hyper-realistic spiritual ¢ctions. Chapter 8 investigates an alternative post-modern reading of religion, in the form of a theology of re/enchantment that ¢nds in our receptivity towards the horizons of alterity and di¡erence the possibility of recovering a sense of the ultimate mystery of the world. Chapter 9 considers attempts by Jewish and Christian theologians to respond to the challenge of post-modernity from the perspective of a commitment to the orthodox core of traditional religious belief. The discussion draws the conclusion that religious education cannot a¡ord to ignore either pre-modern, modern or postmodern readings of religion. Part III sets out to develop an approach to education that, by avoiding the extremes of modern rationalism and post-modern scepticism, seeks to establish an emancipatory pedagogy concerned to gain insight into, and live fruitfully within, a world that is at least partly, though never completely, accessible to human understanding. Chapter 10 considers, in the light of post-modern critiques, the ways in which modern education became rei¢ed into a self-serving system driven by narrowly restrictive approaches to knowledge, assessment, curriculum development and educational management. Chapter 11 focuses on radical proposals for a `post/pedagogy' in which children are invited to construct their own imaginary realities and play without constraint in the post-modern cultural playground. Chapter 12 suggests that post-

The enigma of post-modernity

7

modern concerns to attend to the voice of the Other open up the possibility of a `border pedagogy' in which learning is driven by a sense of awe and wonder in the face of the mystery of the world. Chapter 13 seeks to establish the contours of a critical pedagogy grounded in a creative synergy between education as induction into mystery, and education as the intellectual pursuit of truth. Part IV turns to the issue of religious education. Chapter 14 reviews the emergence of modern religious education, and suggests that its subservience to the mind-set of modernity undermines its integrity by eclipsing questions of ultimate truth. Chapter 15 examines attempts to re-envisage religious education within the relativistic and anti-realistic framework of post/pedagogy. Chapter 16 sets out the case for a transformative religious pedagogy of re/ enchantment, designed to transcend the rei¢ed world of modernity and draw children into a deeper sense of the ultimate mystery of life. Finally Chapter 17 suggests that this renewed sense of the mystery needs to be the subject of sensitive critical re£ection, predicated on the notion of `religious literacy', and on this basis proposes a critical religious education capable of transcending the extremes of modern rationalism and post-modern irrationalism.

Part I

Philosophy

Chapter 2

The legacy of modernity

It is virtually impossible to make sense of post-modernism without reference to modernity; in particular to the rich philosophical legacy of the Enlightenment that has, in recent years, become the target of a series of sustained assaults by post-modern philosophers. Hence this exploration of the interface between religion, education and post-modernity will begin by presenting an initial reading of modernity, a reading designed to act as a foil for the more detailed analysis of post-modernity that follows in subsequent chapters. The discussion of modernity o¡ered here will be driven by two distinctively postmodern concerns. The ¢rst is the issue of the relationship between power and knowledge: we will see how modernity, in seeking to escape from the perceived authoritarianism of traditional theological ways of understanding the world, faced the very real danger of constructing an equally authoritarian humanistic economy of knowledge-as-power; an economy only partially veiled by the claim of modern philosophy to have overseen the emancipation of humanity from the bondage of ignorance and superstition on a scale hitherto undreamt of in the annals of civilisation. The second is the issue of the scope and nature of the various foundational meta-narratives through which the modern age sought to deliver secure and de¢nitive knowledge of the universe by assuming a `god's-eye' perspective on reality: we will explore the suggestion that there is capital to be gained by viewing modernity as the product of the reciprocal interplay of three such meta-narratives ^ naturalism, romanticism and liberalism. It goes without saying, of course, that this chapter makes no attempt to deliver a de¢nitive account of the modern age, merely a heuristic sketch capable of providing working access to the complex legacy of modernity.

Nihilism and the meaning of life In 1641 the French philosopher Rene Descartes published a short book that was to become one of the foundational documents of the modern age. Written in the ¢rst person, with autobiographical overtones that invite comparison with the Confessions of Saint Augustine, the Meditations on First Philosophy tell

The legacy of modernity

11

the story of Descartes' search for the meaning and purpose of life (Descartes 1969). He invites us to join him on a spiritual pilgrimage that leads from the brink of chaos and despair to a clear understanding of our proper place in the ultimate order-of-things. The Meditations constitute, at least in part, Descartes' response to the social, political and intellectual upheavals that characterised much of seventeenth-century Europe immediately prior to the Enlightenment (Gay 1973a, 1973b, Outram 1995). The medieval synthesis of faith and reason, with its vision of the Christian God gracefully overseeing an ordered and purposeful universe, was fast becoming a distant memory as the church, racked by theological controversy and enveloped in waves of religious violence, seemed intent on surrendering the intellectual, moral and spiritual high ground. At the same time the rediscovery of classical humanism during the Renaissance was beginning to bear fruit as new forms of scienti¢c knowledge and humanistic learning o¡ered increasingly enticing alternatives to traditional Christian teaching (Buckley 1987, Byrne 1996). The Meditations depicts Descartes' intellectual progress as he struggles to make sense of this rapidly changing world. `The terrifying quality of the journey is re£ected in the allusions to madness, darkness, the dread of waking from a self-deceptive dream world, the fear of having ``all of a sudden fallen into very deep water'' where ``I can neither make certain of setting my feet on the bottom, nor can I swim and so support myself on the surface'' ' (Bernstein 1983: 17). Doubting in turn the authority of the traditions transmitted by his Catholic education, the reliability of his sense experience, and the veracity of his logical and rational thought processes, Descartes entertains the possibility that some malignant demon may have thrown him into a world whose apparent order is merely an illusion. What if, in the absence of a benevolent God, life has no inherent meaning and purpose? What if our knowledge and experience have no secure foundation? What if I am unable to distinguish between madness and sanity? Commenting on this `cartesian anxiety', Richard Bernstein suggests that Descartes found himself faced with a stark alternative: `Either there is some support for our being, a ¢xed foundation for our knowledge, or we cannot escape the forces of darkness that envelop us with madness, with intellectual and moral chaos' (18). One source of Descartes' hypothetical malignant demon can be found in the late-medieval theology of William of Ockham. Ockham believed that the scholastic synthesis of faith and reason threatened to compromise the sovereignty of God by making him subservient to the authority of human reason (Ockham 1983, 1990, cf. Spade (ed.) 2000). His insistence on God's absolute freedom generated an image of an abstract, impersonal and transcendent deity utterly aloof from the world of human experience. This new theology threatened to eclipse the traditional trinitarian God of Christian orthodoxy who ^ through the incarnation of the Son and transforming presence of the Holy Spirit ^ was believed to be intimately involved with his creation in a loving, gracious and ultimately meaningful manner. Ockham's

12

Religion, education and post-modernity

transcendent deity, attributed with absolute and arbitrary power, was assumed to have the freedom to do what he likes with the world, intervening at will to suspend, disrupt and interrupt the order of nature in ways totally beyond human comprehension; the freedom, that is to say, to behave in a manner remarkably similar to that of Descartes' hypothetical demon. If, in the wake of Ockham's theology, it was no longer possible to be certain of the bene¢cent nature of the creator of the universe, then there appeared to be little reason to trust in the goodness and order of his creation. This opened up the nihilistic possibility that we inhabit a world devoid of meaning, purpose, order and value (Gillespie 1996). The replacement of a loving and gracious God by an arbitrary despot set the will of the latter on a collision course with the collective will of an increasingly proud and assertive humanity. This was nowhere more obvious than when the Protestant doctrine of double predestination ^ that God elects some of us to eternal life and others to eternal damnation ^ is interpreted in the light of Ockham's theology. If such a doctrine is di¤cult to sustain even when God is assumed to be benevolent and all-loving, it becomes almost impossible to accept if the task of assigning souls to eternal damnation is placed in the hands of an arbitrary deity. If God cannot be relied on to provide order and meaning in the universe and guarantee the well being of humanity, then that responsibility must be taken away and placed in safer hands. It comes as no surprise, then, to ¢nd that the philosophers of the Enlightenment, `facing the possibility that all their given reality and perception were illusory, arbitrary and liable to negation at any moment by the Creator, decided to assert themselves and make stable their values, thereby securing a world that a perverted theology had so explicitly abandoned' (Blond 1999: 234). Hence the motto of the Enlightenment was established: sapere aude, `have the courage to use your own reason'. The Enlightenment understood itself as the coming of age of humanity, as that moment in history when human beings ¢nally summoned up the courage to free themselves from the shackles of ignorance and superstition and learnt instead to have faith in our own powers of reasoning. The modern age claimed much: that we need no longer accept a slavish dependence on external authority; that we can trust our own experiences, judgements and reason; that we can discover for ourselves the ultimate meaning and purpose of life; that we are ourselves the true measure of reality and source of order in the world; that, perhaps for the ¢rst time in history, we can start to tell authentic stories about ourselves and our place in the ultimate order-of-things. The story, however, does not end here. For many, including the vast majority of post-modern philosophers, the entire project of modernity must be dismissed as intellectually unobtainable, morally dubious and spiritually vacuous. According to this critique the arrogant claim to have established a godlike understanding of ultimate reality, when coupled with the attempt to

The legacy of modernity

13

wield absolute power, results only in the arbitrary and frequently violent imposition of the human will. The ¢nal outcome of the modernist project is not freedom, liberty and justice, but the terror and genocide that were the bitter fruits of twentieth-century totalitarianism. As Colin Gunton wryly observes, the `arbitrary will of the Ockhamist deity comes to be metamorphosed into the arbitrary will of the human agent' (Gunton 1995: 48). Post-modernity, then, constitutes a reaction against `that strain of modern thought . . . which sees man not as a limited and imperfect being who ``muddles through'', but as a superhuman being who can create the world anew through the application of his in¢nite will' (Gillespie 1996: xxiii). This brings us to the heart of the dispute between modernity and postmodernity, namely the stark choice between what might be termed `archic' order and `an/archic' disorder. At the risk of putting matters too simply, we can say that defenders of modernity, driven by the fear of a descent into chaos in the wake of the loss of faith in a benevolent deity, sought ^ and indeed continue to seek ^ to assert humankind as the secure archimedean point around which all order and meaning revolves. In sharp contrast advocates of post-modernity, acting on their belief that the archic totalitarianism lying at the heart of modernity is no more acceptable than the theological tyranny it sought to replace, elected instead to celebrate the an/archic freedom to wander nomadically in an enchanted world whose meaning is always one step beyond our understanding and which we cannot and must not attempt to either comprehend or control.

Masters of the universe Faced by the threat of a descent into intellectual anarchy Descartes set about establishing secure foundations for his understanding of the world. Though the resulting Cartesian philosophy is now of little more than historic interest, `there can be little doubt that the problems, metaphors and questions that he bequeathed to us have been at the very centre of philosophy since Descartes' (Bernstein 1983: 17). Deeply in£uenced by Descartes' philosophy, the modernist search for certain knowledge through which we might learn to master and control the universe was driven by two interconnected assumptions: the heuristic value of a hermeneutic of suspicion and the central importance of rational autonomy. Descartes establishes his policy of thoroughgoing scepticism, his hermeneutic of suspicion, at the beginning of the Meditations. Acknowledging `the multitude of errors that I have accepted as true in my earliest years', he determines to `make a clean sweep for once in my life, and beginning again from the very foundations . . . establish some secure and lasting result' (Descartes 1969: 61). Just as the presence of a single rotting apple will contaminate an entire basket of fruit, so knowledge based on dubious, false

14

Religion, education and post-modernity

or mistaken premisses is always likely to be unreliable. Descartes assumes that by placing all claims to knowledge under a critical spotlight, by emptying the entire basket of apples and re¢lling it only with ripe fruit, he will be able to consistently and comprehensively exclude ignorance, falsehood and illusion and thereby establish, once and for all, secure epistemological foundations that will enable him to exorcise the demon of nihilism. This critical attitude is now deeply rooted in the collective consciousness of modernity: the modern mind-set accepts, often with startling naivety, the premiss that anything we cannot know for certain must automatically be viewed with suspicion rather than taken on trust. As Michael Polanyi observes, it `has been taken for granted throughout the critical period of philosophy that the acceptance of unproven beliefs was the broad road to darkness' (Polanyi 1958: 269). Such a sceptical approach to knowledge encourages us to draw a clear line of demarcation between the certainties of objective fact and the ambiguities of subjective value. This e¡ectively reduces aesthetic, moral and theological discourse to the status of mere opinion, thereby circumventing any expectation that they might contribute to our knowledge and understanding of ourselves, of the world we indwell, and of the ultimate order-ofthings. This is seen most clearly in the insistence of the logical positivists that all such value-statements are quite literally meaningless, since we have no way of empirically verifying the truth of propositions concerned with issues of goodness, beauty and transcendence. There is no place here for a contingent rationality rooted in re£ective wisdom, critical judgement, responsible faith and reasoned commitment; no scope for acknowledging that `human intellectual enterprises are necessarily fallible, but not for that matter, necessarily mistaken' (Gunton 1983: 145). According to the hermeneutic of suspicion the fact that my eyes do on occasions deceive me means that I can no longer trust my sight at all. This rules out the otherwise common-sense presumption ^ with which we are all surely familiar ^ that though we do at times make mistakes, as a general rule of thumb we normally see things with relative accuracy. It is worth noting in passing the way in which this hermeneutical scepticism resonates with the deconstructive procedures of post-modern philosophy. The thoroughgoing agnosticism of post-modernity towards our knowledge of the order-of-things can be traced back to the modernist hermeneutic of suspicion, the only substantial di¡erence being post-modernity's lack of any positive or constructive element: where modernity tears down in order to rebuild on secure foundations, post-modernity simply tears down. Modernity and post-modernity thus share a common heritage: both embrace the habit of suspicion, scepticism and doubt, one as a means of establishing the foundations of knowledge, the other as a means of demonstrating that such foundations are unobtainable. Descartes' project of systematic doubt comes to a halt once he recognises that the very fact that he is doubting ^ that he has freely chosen to embrace a

The legacy of modernity

15

hermeneutic of suspicion ^ cannot be denied, even by a malignant demon: cogito ergo sum, `I think, therefore I am'. It is here, in the immediacy of his re£ective self-awareness, that Descartes arrives at the archimedean point from which all distinctively modern ways of knowing proceed: if I am to accept something as true then it must be something I know for myself, something I have experienced at ¢rst hand; if I am to live authentically in the modern world then I must learn to have the courage to think for myself, to trust the evidence of my own senses, to follow my own feelings and instincts, to do things my way. I cannot live vicariously at second hand, trusting in external authority and allowing other people's experiences to act as substitutes for my own. It is my own unique existential reality, rather than any shared beliefs or collective experiences, that must act as my ultimate guide. The hermeneutic of suspicion thus leads directly to the distinctively modern notion of rational autonomy: independent, emancipated, self-governing and self-reliant. This modern commitment to personal freedom and the veracity of private experience is a response, at least in part, to the fear that we might be the playthings of forces beyond our control. Two comments are in order here. The ¢rst is to note that the familiar rhetoric of personal freedom all too easily disguises the dark side of modern autonomy: the tyranny that can £ow from the assertion of my right to do as I wish regardless of the needs of others; the exploitation of labour and rape of the environment that are the fruits of the free play of consumer capitalism; the autistic isolation and solipsistic dislocation that lead directly to exclusion, detachment and alienation. The construct of modern autonomy undermines traditional notions of relational selfhood in which our identities are formed through participation with others in community, and which gives the duty of care precedence over the rhetoric of rights. The second observation is simply to register, once again, the generic connection between modernity and post-modernity. The modernist belief that personal experience constitutes the yardstick against which reality is to be measured is only a short step away from the post-modern contention that we are free to construct our own preferred realities unhampered by any external in£uences or pressures. As Charles Taylor, one of the most vociferous critics of modern individualism puts it, post-modernism's `underlying ideal is some variant of that most invisible, because it is the most pervasive, of all modern goods, unconstrained freedom' (Taylor 1992a: 489). By stripping away all false and dubious opinion in an attempt to uncover the secure bed-rock of human reason and experience Descartes e¡ectively conquered his demons, overcame his anxieties, and established the foundations upon which the edi¢ce of modern knowledge was constructed. In the brave new world of modernity the omnipotence of God is replaced by the omni-competence of human reason, and as a result it appears possible to construct meta-narratives o¡ering foundational accounts of the ultimate order-of-things. The remainder of this chapter will explore the contours of

16

Religion, education and post-modernity

three such modern meta-narratives: naturalism, which grounds reality in the natural order described by the natural sciences; romanticism, which roots meaning in moral, aesthetic and religious experience; and liberalism, which seeks to maintain a social polity in accordance with the twin principles of freedom and tolerance.

Knowledge and the natural world Modernity is predicated on the assumption of an epistemological distance between ourselves and the world. The hermeneutic of suspicion, by questioning the authenticity of our knowledge of reality, brings about the withdrawal and dislocation of the mind from the external world `out there'. At the same time the new-found faith in the omni-competence of reason in general, and of modern science in particular, encourages the search for ways of establishing secure and certain knowledge as a means of reconnecting the mind with the natural order-of-things. This distinctively modern perspective on the problem of knowledge views the primary epistemological task as that of establishing accurate representations of the natural world in the inner space of the mind. As Richard Rorty puts it, the picture which holds traditional philosophy captive is that of the mind as a great mirror, containing various representations ^ some accurate, some not . . . Without the notion of the mind as a mirror, the notion of knowledge as accuracy of representation would not have suggested itself. Without this latter notion, the strategy common to Descartes and Kant ^ getting more accurate representations by inspecting, repairing and polishing the mirror so to speak ^ would not have made sense. (Rorty 1980: 12) This contrast between the internal operations of the mind and the external reality of the material world has its modern roots in Descartes' identi¢cation of the `mental' and the `physical' as the two basic substances, or buildingblocks, of the universe. Such dualistic thinking constitutes a ¢ssure that cuts through the very heart of modernity, leading directly to the identi¢cation of two contrasting foundations of knowledge, two di¡erent criteria for truth, two distinct ways of representing the ultimate order-of-things: on the one hand naturalism identi¢es reality with the sum of the facts of the material world, while on the other idealism equates reality with the sum of the ideas contained in our minds. Modern naturalistic philosophy builds on a realist theory of truth predicated on the correspondence of ideas contained within the mind and the external physical world. Here the role of language is to establish a bridge between the mental and the physical by accurately representing the facts of the natural world in the mirror of the mind. Our ¢ve senses constitute the basis of all

The legacy of modernity

17

knowledge: by describing our empirical experience in an ordered, systematic and scienti¢c way we are able to establish knowledge of the natural world, a world that constitutes the ultimate source of all such experience. Naturalism is thus rooted in the tradition of empirical philosophy that can be traced from John Locke through David Hume to logical positivism. The £ourishing of the natural sciences ^ itself a distinguishing mark of modernity ^ both gains support from, and gives support to, empirical philosophy. Despite its achievements empiricism was never totally blind to Descartes' concerns about the reliability of our sense experience. David Hume represents the sceptical strand of empirical philosophy (Hume 1978). Keenly aware of the problems surrounding the accuracy and veracity of sense experience, he insisted that such experience consists of an ongoing stream of individual atomistic `moments' or `events' upon which we impose our own sense of order. We have no direct experience of cause and e¡ect in the material world, rather these are merely concepts that we impose on nature in order to bring a sense of order and meaning to our sense impressions. It is worth noting in passing just how close Hume comes to the post-modern assertion that we create our own reality out of the raw material of random experience. At the other end of the philosophical spectrum stand the logical positivists, who sought to blaze a trail beyond Hume's scepticism (Ayer 1971). They did so by invoking the principle of veri¢cation, which demanded that all truth claims be tested against empirical experience in order to distinguish between propositions that are true, propositions that are false, and propositions that are, quite literally, meaningless: statements are known to be true once they have been veri¢ed and shown to provide accurate descriptions of the natural world; statements are known to be false whenever the process of veri¢cation demonstrates that they fail to accurately depict the natural world; and statements are known to be meaningless in those instances where it is impossible to show how they could be veri¢ed as either true or false. This e¡ectively reduces all moral, aesthetic and religious discourse to the level of emotive utterances incapable of engaging cognitively with the real world; it is not possible to verify on the basis of sense experience whether a person is good, a sunset beautiful, or God holy, since we can neither see, smell, taste, touch or hear goodness, beauty or holiness. Hence naturalism invites us to draw a sharp distinction between, on the one hand our objective and veri¢able knowledge of the brute facts of physical reality, and on the other our subjective and unveri¢able opinions regarding the ¢ctional realm of beliefs and values. This is a classic case of reality being forced to conform to the limits of our ability to establish knowledge of the world: that which lies beyond our senses is treated as a netherworld of meaningless unreality rather than as the mystery of the order-of-things that, for the present at least, stands beyond the limits of human comprehension. This dualistic mind-set `implies the discarding by scienti¢c thought of all considerations based upon value concepts, such as perfection, harmony, meaning

18

Religion, education and post-modernity

and aim, and ¢nally the devalualization of being, the divorce of the world of value from the world of facts' (Koyre 1957: 276). It is at this point that the post-modern critique of naturalism kicks in with a vengeance. Cut o¡ from any moral constraint, and wedded to a quasi-evolutionary myth of inevitable scienti¢c progress, modern science gives free rein to the cancerous development of technologies of death and destruction whose rapid growth outstrips the civilised world's ability to control them. We manipulate ourselves and our environment without rhyme or reason, simply because we are able to do so, any moral `ought' having long since been replaced by an a/moral `can'. From a post-modern perspective the ultimate irony of modernity is that the self-proclaimed omni-competence of humanity becomes the primary source of the re-enslavement of the human race. The chief e¡ects of elevating the narrative of naturalism to the position of being the ultimate and exclusive meta-narrative of modernity are two-fold: reality is reduced to the value-free deterministic play of cause and e¡ect in the physical world, and the natural scientist is appointed as arbiter, mediator and high priest of ultimate truth. Wittgenstein understood the implications of this situation better than most. In the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus he mimics the logical positivists in proclaiming that the natural world is all that is the case and that everything else, all our moral, aesthetic and religious concerns, must be left unspoken (Wittgenstein 1974: 5, 74). However ^ and herein lies the originality of Wittgenstein ^ he goes on to insist that those who properly understand this philosophy will recognise it as no more than a ladder which once climbed must be cast away, since it is in the silent spaces where language cannot intrude that we encounter the ultimate mystery of the universe: `To view the world sub specie aeterni is to view it as a whole ^ a limited whole. Feeling the world as a limited whole ^ it is this that is mystical' (73).

The romantic mirror Wittgenstein was not alone in recognising the reductive horizons of naturalism and its inability to do more than skim the surface of the sensible world. From the outset modernity itself engendered an alternative romantic metanarrative that ^ functioning as a mirror-image of naturalism ^ claimed to encounter truth not in the natural world, but in the idealistic realm of the thoughts, ideas and experiences we carry around in our heads independently of any sense experience. Unlike Locke, who believed that we enter this world with minds like empty vessels ^ tabula rasa ^ dependent exclusively on sense experience to provide the marks of knowledge, Descartes held that we are born with minds brimful of innate ideas awaiting the necessary spark of insight that will draw them into full consciousness. According to idealism our understanding of the order-of-things is not rooted in sense experience, but

The legacy of modernity

19

rather in the mental ideas, pictures and constructions of reality present in our minds. This requires a coherence theory of truth, in which the veracity of our understanding of reality is judged in terms of its inherent clarity, connectedness and cohesiveness. Here the task of language is not to build a bridge between the mind and the external world, but rather to give coherent expression to our inner thoughts, experiences and intuitions. The classic examples of modern idealism are to be found in the allembracing systems of rational philosophy developed by Spinoza, Leibniz and Hegel. Perhaps the most signi¢cant development within modern idealism, however, was the shift from a rational to an experiential mind-set that began towards the end of the eighteenth century and reached fruition in the full £owering of romanticism in the nineteenth century. Where the idealists gave priority to a dialectic of reason, Rousseau, Fichte, Novalis, Schlegel and other romantic philosophers placed aesthetic, moral and spiritual experience at the centre of their understanding of the world. Sense gave way to sensibility as the idealistic commitment to rational coherence as the key criterion for truth gave way to the romantic criteria of the intensity and authority of inner feelings and emotions. In the world of romanticism it was those men and women of genius ^ poets, musicians, artists and visionaries ^ uniquely gifted with the ability to express creatively and imaginatively their inner sensibilities who sought to usurp both natural scientists and rationalistic philosophers as the priestly arbiters of truth and mediators of reality. If the advantage the romantics held over the naturalists was their recognition that the realms of aesthetics, morality and religion needed to recover the voice denied them by those who sought to reduce reality to the sum of our sense experience of the physical world, the disadvantage of their position lay in the inherently speculative nature of the romantic enterprise. The loss of the objective certainties provided by empirical veri¢cation left romanticism vulnerable to the charge of a dubious reliance on the subjective imagination. This is seen clearly in Kant's embryonic version of romanticism, which distinguished between the realms of `phenomena' and `noumena', between things as-they-appear-to-me and things as-they-are-in-themselves (Kant 1999a). According to Kant our understanding of the world is dependent on the innate structures of the mind, those pre-established categories of understanding that form the cognitive spectacles through which we view reality. As a result we only ever have access to the phenomenological world of appearances, never the noumenal world of things as they are in themselves. Following Kant I can no longer say `This is the case', only that `It appears to me that this is the case'. Kant thus unwittingly gives birth to a distinctively modern mode of expression: `From my point of view . . .', `The way I see it . . .', `In my opinion . . .'. The failure of romanticism to show how aesthetic, moral and religious sensibility relate to the external world meant that, in some quarters at least,

20

Religion, education and post-modernity

intensity of feeling itself became the measure of reality: romanticism, when coupled with Descartes' insistence on the primacy of re£ective selfconsciousness, gives me the freedom to read the world in my own terms, through my own personal frame of reference; nobody has the right to tell me that my experience is illegitimate, my reasoning incorrect, or my emotions misdirected. Hence the truth of my value system lies not in its connection with any external order, not in any objective or ontological foundation, but simply in the fact that I have an emotional commitment to it. As David Hume puts it: `All sentiment is right; because sentiment has a reference to nothing beyond itself, and is always real, whenever a man is conscious of it' (quoted in Cassirer 1951: 307). Though it was never his intention, Kant e¡ectively severed any connection between knowledge and belief, `depriving faith of any objective or ontological reference and emptying it of any real cognitive content', and in the process `giving rise to a romantic idealism where the human spirit could range at will, uncontrolled by scienti¢c evidence or knowledge' (Torrance 1980: 27). Two concluding observations are in order here. The ¢rst is to note the strong family resemblance between romanticism's faith in aesthetic, moral and spiritual sensibility, and the post-modern commitment to desire and feeling as the basis upon which we are free to construct the world we wish to inhabit. The second is to raise the question of the relationship between the meta-narratives of naturalism and romanticism, in particular the possibility of their functioning together e¡ectively ^ one by o¡ering access to the realm of physical fact, the other by o¡ering access to the realm of human value ^ in a manner that, despite the obvious tensions existing between them, need not require one to be discarded in favour of the other.

The ethics of liberalism We have seen how the modern search for secure knowledge, predicated on the omni-competence of human reason, resulted in the emergence of two contrasting ^ though potentially complementary ^ ways of understanding the world: on the one hand the discovery of scienti¢c fact grounded in the objectivity of the natural world, and on the other the intuition of moral, aesthetic and spiritual value grounded in the authenticity of subjective feeling and experience. The largely unresolved tensions between the two lead Gunton to observe that `the personal and physical universes we inhabit have been so divorced that the morality we should adapt to our world is a matter of scandal and confusion . . . This divorce of the natural and the moral universes is perhaps the worst legacy of the Enlightenment, and the most urgent challenge facing modern humankind' (Gunton 1985: 25). In attempting to reconcile the realms of fact and value modernity forged a third, unifying, meta-narrative: liberalism, which sought to mediate between naturalism and romanticism, not by resolving the con£icts between them as

The legacy of modernity

21

Gunton appears to demand, but rather by establishing a framework within which they could learn to live together in relative harmony despite their signi¢cant di¡erences. The resulting liberal polity was predicated on the twin principles of freedom of belief and tolerance of the beliefs of others. Insofar as liberalism was able to gather together and mediate between the metanarratives of naturalism and romanticism, so it established itself as the dominant meta-narrative of modernity. Liberalism can be traced back at least as far as John Locke. As much a pragmatic politician as a philosopher, Locke was quick to recognise the practical limitations of naturalism, in particular its inability to deal adequately with questions of value that he believed to be central to individual well being and the £ourishing of society (Locke 1975, 1993). As a result justi¢ed belief played just as signi¢cant a role in his philosophy as did secure knowledge. In a¤rming the vital signi¢cance of our beliefs and values Locke made no attempt to deny their subjective nature: `the limits of human knowledge are so narrow and the probability of error on speculative matters so great that we can never know for certain that our religious opinions are correct and all others false and heretical' (O'Connor 1952: 212). This led him to a¤rm the principle of freedom of belief in all matters that could not be shown to constitute incontrovertible factual knowledge. In time this liberal strategy satis¢ed both the naturalists, who could hold fast to the secure results of the scienti¢c enterprise, and the romantics, who could continue to celebrate the authenticity of moral, aesthetic and spiritual experience. The principle of freedom of belief did not come with a particularly high price-tag: merely the duty of tolerance demanded by the moral imperative that, if we assert our freedom to believe whatever we like, then we must be willing to respect the freedom of others to do likewise. Locke's account of liberalism was originally intended as a heuristic narrative, one designed to enable the search for truth and mutual understanding to take place in an atmosphere of conviviality and mutual respect against a background of widespread religious and cultural tensions. However, with the passage of time liberalism was gradually transformed from a heuristic device into a speci¢c, and in places narrowly dogmatic, world-view. As the twin principles of freedom and tolerance came to be seen as ends in themselves, rather than as a means to the greater end of mutual understanding across cultural divides, so the observance of Locke's principles began to be rigorously policed and enforced. Karl Popper's famous `paradox of tolerance', for example, insists that unlimited tolerance ultimately leads only to the death of tolerance itself: since `it may easily turn out that they [the intolerant] are not willing to meet us on the level of rational argument . . . we should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant' (Popper 1966: 265). Writing in 1945, against the background of the battle to secure liberal democracy from the twin threats of fascism and Marxism, Popper's aim was to protect society from closed totalitarian

22

Religion, education and post-modernity

communities living `in a charmed circle of unchanging taboos, of laws and customs which are felt to be as inevitable as the rising of the sun, or the cycle of the seasons' (57). The supreme irony here was that those who did not consider themselves part of the liberal order increasingly viewed liberalism itself as just such a closed community. For many not charmed by the immediacy of the liberal life-world, liberalism has long since passed beyond Locke's original ideal of a moral framework through which fundamental disputes can be explored in an environment of mutual tolerance, and established itself instead as a ¢xed world-view that demands the unquestioning allegiance of all freedom-loving people. As Alasdair MacIntyre observes, the mind-set of modern liberalism increasingly forms a closed society in which `the facts of disagreement themselves frequently go unacknowledged, disguised by a rhetoric of consensus' (MacIntyre 1988: 2). The ¢nal outcome of the project of modernity is, on this reading, the hegemony of a closed world of liberal values rooted in a liberal meta-narrative that functions to paper over the dualistic tensions between the meta-narratives of naturalism and romanticism. We began this chapter with the suggestion the roots of the project of modernity are primarily theological. The late-medieval distinction between the abstract `God of the philosophers' and the personal `God of Abraham' led to the fear that the universe might be controlled by an arbitrary and demonic deity, and that consequently we inhabit a world of an/archic disorder whose ultimate principles are those of chaos and violence. Faced with this dilemma the project of modernity set out to establish a world of archic order by asserting the power of human beings to comprehend, organise and control the universe. This resulted in the emergence of three interlinked meta-narratives that together constitute the core of modernity: the naturalistic meta-narrative of the hegemony of science that o¡ers technological control of the physical world; the romantic meta-narrative of moral, aesthetic and spiritual sensibility that gives life meaning and purpose; and the liberal meta-narrative of the ascendancy of the principles of freedom and tolerance through which cultural diversity is governed and policed. For post-modern philosophers this modernist belief in the omni-competence of human reason, and in the ability of these three meta-narratives to give a full and truthful account of the ultimate order-of-things, constitutes a moral, spiritual and intellectual arrogance that must be deconstructed if society is to avoid drifting into the archic nihilism of cultural totalitarianism. Exactly how postmodernity implemented this deconstructive agenda is the subject of the next chapter.

Chapter 3

Post-modern foundations

In the previous chapter we characterised modernity as an attempt to a¤rm the power of the human will and authority of human reason, thereby securing knowledge of the order-of-things and insight into the meaning and purpose of life. In this chapter we will consider ways in which post-modernity has set about deconstructing the modernist project. Our discussion will focus in the main on the work of a triumvirate of leading French post-modern intellectuals: Jean-Franc° ois Lyotard, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. From a post-modern perspective the faith invested by modern philosophers in human nature is fundamentally misplaced, humanity having shown itself to be just as tyrannical as the despotic deity it seeks to displace. You `may have killed God beneath the weight of all that you have said', cautions Foucault, `but don't imagine that, with all that you are saying, you will make a man that will live longer than he' (Foucault 1989: 211). The fact that we are unable to fully comprehend reality leaves us with little choice but `to abandon all those discourses that once led us to the sovereignty of consciousness' (202). Further, modernity's construction of humanity is no more than a pious ¢ction, destined to be erased `like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea' (Foucault 1974: 387). In e¡ect Foucault dismisses modernity as nothing more than `a momentary ``fold'' in the fabric of knowledge, an episode brought about by the enlightenment need to think of man as the rational, autonomous dispenser of his own moral laws' (Norris 1987: 221).

Farewell to meta-narratives We need look no further than the streets of Paris in May 1968 to discover the symbolic birthplace of post-modernity. It was there that widespread civil unrest, paralleled elsewhere in Europe and North America, came to a head as students, trade unionists and left-wing activists fought pitched battles with French riot police. Though any speci¢c grievances were quickly obscured ^ initially in a haze of tear gas and later through a wistful myth-making ^ opposition to the war in Vietnam, hostility to the politics of the extreme right, concerns about the political disenfranchisement of students, together

24

Religion, education and post-modernity

with a rejection of western capitalism in general, were not far from the centre of the agenda. If it was clear that something was radically wrong with society, the protester's attempts to identify the exact source of the problem appeared haphazard, and their vision of how to move things forward poorly articulated. Thirty-¢ve years on the pattern has not changed signi¢cantly: meetings of international ¢nanciers and politicians are now regularly lobbied by anti-capitalist protesters united in their desire to overthrow `the system', but ^ on the surface at least ^ o¡ering little more than idealistic platitudes to put in its place. Paris in the spring of 1968 provided a fertile breeding ground for the avant-garde of post-modernism's intellectual elite: convinced of the moribund state of the project of modernity, clear about the need to deconstruct its hegemonic claim to power masquerading as knowledge, yet strangely silent on the practical question of what to put in its place. Their in£uence quickly spread across parts of Europe, North America and Australasia, dragging many academics along in its wake, whilst at the same time encountering sti¡ resistance from scholars fearful of the onset of a new age of barbarism. The battle over the nature of post-modernity continues to rage: for many of its supporters it represents a fundamental paradigm shift into a new and better order, while for its critics it remains a derisory pseudointellectual a¡air enticing society into a cultural somnambulism from which it must eventually awake. Though Lyotard expressed initial enthusiasm for the events of May 1968, he quickly became disillusioned by the political failure of the left wing to capitalise on the situation. As the shortcomings of the Marxist version of the modern myth of progress became increasingly clear, so Lyotard renounced his previous faith in universal reason. The quintessentially modern disciplines of phenomenology and structuralism, he argued, must come to terms with their historical relativity by dropping their claims to illuminate the timeless essence of human nature and shed light on the fundamental structures of reality. The modernist search for universal truth, for the ultimate metanarrative capable of explaining the totality of the order-of-things, must give way to an acceptance of a diversity of local micro-narratives whose horizons are necessarily limited by the contingencies of culture and the accidents of space and time. In The Postmodern Condition Lyotard de¢nes post-modernity as `incredulity towards metanarratives' (Lyotard 1984: xxiv). He bids farewell to any modern world-view or system claiming access to a comprehensive god's-eye understanding of the ultimate order of reality, and explains that he will use the term `post-modern' `to designate any science that legitimates itself with reference to a metadiscourse . . . making an explicit appeal to some grand narrative, such as the dialectics of Spirit, the hermeneutics of meaning, the emancipation of the rational or working subject, or the creation of wealth' (xxiii). Lyotard's justi¢cation for this now familiar post-modern strategy begins with the observation that technological developments in information

Post-modern foundations

25

processing and storage have fundamentally altered the nature and status of knowledge. No longer a means of engaging with fundamental questions of meaning and truth, knowledge has been transformed into just another commodity to be bought and sold on the open market. Lyotard wrote before the advent of the world wide web, which has since assumed a paradigmatic status within post-modern philosophy. When we surf the internet we encounter such an unlimited and constantly changing reservoir of sound, image and text that we are forced to accept that we no longer possess a common overarching story capable of making sense of the abundance of information passing before us. Faced with a plethora of ultimately indecipherable language games we have no choice but to embrace an `agnostics of language': we have no means of legitimating our beliefs, no adequate criteria on which to base our judgements, no access to trustworthy hermeneutical procedures, and no secure knowledge of the way our language latches onto reality (10). The post-modern condition is the condition of being left only with micronarratives: small, local, relativistic stories that ^ precisely because they make no universal claims ^ enable us to challenge modern discourses of power, free us to listen to alternative stories, and promise emancipation from the tyranny of human reason. The threat of a descent into nihilism is not rooted in our failure to establish secure and certain knowledge, despite the claims of the Enlightenment to the contrary, but rather £ows directly from the modern insistence on knowing in aggressively universal and totalitarian ways. For Lyotard an an/archic relativism is in¢nitely preferable to an archic totalitarianism. Consequently he issues his call to arms: `Let us wage war on totality; let us be witnesses to the unpresentable' (82).

Beyond logo-centrism It would be wrong, however, to assume that post-modern philosophers reject meta-narratives simply because they are unable to ¢nd good reasons for choosing between the plurality of such narratives. It is not simply the case that we are forced into agnosticism because we ¢nd ourselves swamped by the sheer weight of linguistic diversity. On the contrary, the post-modern critique of modernity runs much deeper than this. It is part of human nature to try to make sense of the universe, and western civilisation has sought to do so on the basis of a distinctive mind-set grounded in the principles of `ontotheology', `logo-centrism' and a `metaphysic of presence', and it is precisely this mind-set that post-modernity sets out to deconstruct. The post-modern position will become clearer as we unpack each of these three concepts. Firstly, the western mind-set is driven by onto-theological questions. Heidegger employs this term to combine two ideas: the ontological quest for `Being', capitalised to indicate not the existence of particular objects, but the brute fact of reality itself; and the theological quest for God, understood as

26

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the source and ground of Being (Heidegger 1962). Onto-theology is thus concerned to identify the ultimate bed-rock of reality, the ultimate reason why there is `something' rather than `nothing'. Secondly the western mindset is logo-centric, that is, it assumes that reality is ordered, structured and open to rational investigation. In classical Greek philosophy the logos is the rational principle upon which the entire universe is ordered; similarly, in the Judaeo-Christian tradition the logos is the Word of God, the self-expression of divine wisdom. Thirdly the western mind-set is dependent on a metaphysics of presence. The rational desire to comprehend the ultimate orderof-things assumes the existence of a mind ^ whether divine or human ^ capable of doing so: `metaphysics' here refers to the investigation of the nature, form and structure of the universe, while `presence' refers to the assumption that the universe can be properly understood as it presents itself for rational scrutiny before a mind capable of comprehending it. We can conclude from this that according to this distinctive mind-set reality itself is ordered, structured and open to rational scrutiny, and it is precisely because this is the case that we can construct meta-narratives that explain the ultimate order-of-things. If, however, faith in onto-theology, logo-centrism and the metaphysics of presence is shown to be misplaced, then meta-narratives immediately become untenable. This is precisely the stance adopted by postmodern philosophers: modernity, they claim, must be rejected because it is based on false premisses. Historically this distinctive mind-set took as its primary point of reference the concept of God, which functioned in classical philosophy as the originating principle of rational order in the universe, and in the three great western monotheistic religions ^ Judaism, Christianity and Islam ^ as the personal deity who creates and sustains a purposeful and meaningful world. Thus, according to the ¢rst of the creation myths in the Hebrew Bible, `God said, ``Let there be light,'' and there was light. God saw that light was good, and God divided light from darkness' (Genesis 1:3). The second creation myth makes it clear that human speech is adequate to the task of describing creation only because God wills this to be the case: having created `all the wild animals and the birds of heaven', God brought them to Adam since `each one was to bear the name the man would give it' (2:19). The story goes on to explain how the fall of humanity and subsequent expulsion from the garden of Eden clouded the primal transparency of human language. From now on humanity's vision of the divinely ordained order-of-things was impaired by the reality of sin. [E]ver since the creation of the world, the invisible existence of God and his everlasting power have been clearly seen by the mind's understanding of created things. And so these people have no excuse: they knew God and yet they did not honour him as God or give thanks to him, but their arguments became futile and their uncomprehending minds were

Post-modern foundations

27

darkened. While they claimed to be wise, in fact they were growing so stupid that they exchanged the glory of the immortal God for an imitation, for the image of a mortal human being, or of birds, or animals, or crawling things. (Romans 1:20¡ ) All human attempts to ¢nd a route back to paradise inevitably ended in failure: the biblical legend of the Tower of Babel (probably an allusion to the Babylonian Ziggurats, designed to reach up to the heavens) warns of the ine¡ectiveness of such hubris (Genesis 11:1^9). Human reason became impotent, society fragmented and language dissolved in a babble of con£icting voices: `Yahweh confused the language of the whole world' and scattered human beings `all over the world' (Genesis 11:9). The only hope for human salvation lay in divine initiative, whether this be God's covenant with his chosen people, the incarnation of his Word in Jesus of Nazareth, or the revelation of the will of Allah in the Holy Qur'an. Modernity ^ as we have already noted ^ rejects the Abrahamic belief that our salvation is dependent on the actions of a graceful and merciful God, and instead claims that we are capable of engineering our own salvation. As such it constitutes an attempt to recover the Pelagian-like theology of the classical Greco-Roman tradition. Here the dilemma facing humanity is not the reality of original sin, nor the actuality of an unbridgeable gulf between God and creation, but rather a simple loss of memory. We are all created with a spark of divinity in us and, though we might have forgotten this, we remain capable of recovering it through good education. Thus Plato, in both the Meno and the Phaedo, presents learning as essentially a process of recollection: knowledge is latent in the human soul, and education invites us to recover an awareness of that which we have forgotten we possess. Learning shares with reminiscence the character of a recognition. Socrates' question, typically requiring a yes or no answer, is to be answered by introspection, by the interlocutor `looking into himself ' and ¢nding the answer there. It confronts the learner with something he recognises as familiar, as something he ¢nds already within himself, although he has been unaware of it. (Scolnicov 1996: 484) There is, then, a fundamental di¡erence between theological and philosophical readings of human nature. According to the Abrahamic traditions we are created ex nihilo, and ¢nd our salvation only through the grace and benevolence of our creator, whereas in the classical tradition we are formed from the eternal substance of divine reality and have within us the potential to achieve our own salvation (Gunton 1998: 51). For the former the fall of humanity constitutes a radical systems error that can only be repaired by

28

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divine intervention, while for the latter the human dilemma is merely the result of a failure to retrieve information already contained within a system that continues to be fully operational. In the light of these observations the modern insistence on the authority of human reason can be seen as a move within the ongoing dispute between theological and philosophical attempts to make sense of the universe, a dispute that constitutes a central feature of the landscape of western intellectual history. The signi¢cance of post-modernity lies in its desire to transcend this dispute entirely, and in doing so to make a decisive break with rational modes of thought. Its rejection of logo-centrism in both its theological and philosophical forms was nourished by the anti-rationalism of pre-Socratic philosophy, by those strands of traditional negative theology that insisted on the inability of the mind to fully comprehend God, and by the traces of an eclectic and sceptical counter-tradition of resistance to the conceits of logocentrism discernible at the fringes of modern thought (Berlin 1997: 243¡, 2000). What if humanity is not up to its self-appointed task? What if our faith in the omni-competence of human reason is misplaced? What if our language does not properly represent the actual order-of-things? What if the logo-centric assumptions upon which the entire edi¢ce of western civilisation is based are mistaken? Post-modernity constitutes the full £owering of this sceptical counter-heritage. At the heart of post-modernity lies the belief that the tyranny of human reason is no better than the tyranny of the despotic deity modernity sought to displace: neither theology nor philosophy, at least as traditionally conceived, is capable of illuminating the future path that humanity must tread. The western dream of securing a place in a world of order, meaning and purpose is undermined by the brute fact that we are simply not capable of achieving this goal, either through our own e¡orts or with divine assistance: our attempts to become masters of the universe, grounded in the principles of onto-theology, logo-centrism and a metaphysic of presence, are constructed on foundations of sand.

The death of the author Logo-centric thought, rooted in the premiss that reason can make complete sense of reality, has always been closely linked with a `phono-centrism' that a¤rms the centrality of the voice, the primacy of the spoken word over the written word. The problem with writing is that it is always open to a diverse range of interpretations. This hermeneutical problem is reduced, however, whenever we are able to obtain clari¢cation by speaking directly to the author of the text we are trying to interpret. Since the written word is merely a secondary expression of the author's primary thoughts, feelings and experiences, it follows that direct speech ^ £owing immediately from the mind of the speaker ^ constitutes a more authentic source of meaning than the circuitous route of writing. At its most basic phono-centrism asserts that a

Post-modern foundations

29

face-to-face discussion or telephone conversation has more existential immediacy than a letter, e-mail or text-message. In the act of speaking I seem to coincide with myself in a way quite different from what happens when I write. My spoken word seems immediately present to my consciousness and my voice becomes their intimate spontaneous medium. In writing, by contrast, my meanings threaten to escape from my control. Writing seems to rob me of my being; it is a second-hand mode of communication, a pallid mechanical transcription of speech and so always at one remove from my consciousness. (Sarup 1988: 39) There is a clear epistemological sequence at work here: I experience, I vocalise my experience, I transcribe my speech into writing. According to phonocentrism the closer an interpreter comes to vicariously and empathetically `living out' my original experience, the more authentic and accurate will be his or her understanding of what I have to say. Post-modernity reverses this polarity: primacy is given to the written word over the spoken word. The act of reading opens up the possibility of a range of alternative interpretations, and it is entirely arbitrary to assume that any one reading is necessarily correct, canonical or authoritative. This includes interpretations that claim to coincide with the original intentions of the author. Consequently post-modernity is fundamentally sceptical about the value of a hermeneutic that seeks to pass beyond the written word and recover the original experience of the text's author as a means of revealing the `true' meaning of the text under consideration. Underlying the postmodern rejection of phono-centrism lies a deep scepticism about the ability of human experience to adequately engage with the ultimate structures of reality. This reversal of polarities, giving writing priority over the spoken word, is a direct result of the post-modern response to structuralism; indeed, for many commentators post-modernity is simply post-structuralism writ large. Structuralism £ourished, especially in France, in the 1950s and 1960s. The roots of this philosophical movement are to be found in the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, who sought to develop a scienti¢c model of language radically di¡erent from the familiar romantic tradition that viewed language as the medium through which we express our inner experiences. Words, according to Saussure, are made up of sound and meaning: the `signi¢er' is the sound-image attached to a spoken word, while the `signi¢ed' is the concept or meaning we customarily attach to, or associate with, the sound (Saussure 1983). He argued that the relationship between signi¢er and signi¢ed ^ between sound and meaning ^ is entirely arbitrary: there is no necessary connection between language and inner experience, or between language and the external world. Saussure concludes from this that language

30

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is no more than a system of arbitrary signs, and as such constitutes a closed self-referential system: in order to understand language one simply examines the inter-relationship between words; it is not necessary to look beyond language to some prior non-linguistic reality such as authorial intention or the natural world. Critical realists ¢nd this line of reasoning deeply £awed: `If dog is an ``arbitrary'' sign for a dog, it is at any rate a sign for a dog, and that must mean that it can refer to a dog: and a dog is a dog, not a word' (Williams 2002: 6). Nevertheless structuralism insists that in order to understand a text we no longer need to ask two classic hermeneutical questions: `What meaning is the author trying to convey in this text?' and `Does this text adequately represent the actual world?' Instead we must attend to the structure of language itself, examining the inter-relationship of the words on the page and unpacking the linguistic rules ^ grammatical, phonetic and syntactical ^ they obey. According to structural linguistics language constitutes an autonomous system driven, organised and structured by its own internal procedures and conventions. Post-structuralism, the twin sister of post-modernism, was quick to recognise the profound implications of structuralism: since language is an autonomous, self-serving and self-contained system, it follows that our understanding of reality and grasp of the ultimate meaning and purpose of life, insofar as it is dependent on language, is actually formed and conditioned by the games language plays with us, and the linguistic conventions we are forced to adopt. The modern notion that language is a transparent medium through which we construct meta-narratives that authentically represent the actual order-of-things becomes redundant. Language controls experience, not experience language. This claim challenges the very foundations of modernity, predicated as it is on the assumption that our ability to comprehend the world is dependent on our ability to control language. Once language becomes our master rather than our servant any hope of producing meta-narratives is lost. When structuralism destroyed the phono-centric dependence of language on experience it e¡ectively undermined the modernist faith in the authority and power of such experience: we are no longer masters of the universe we inhabit because we have become imprisoned by the very language we created. The fact that a text no longer needs to be interpreted with reference to the intentions and experiences of its originator brings about the symbolic `death of the author', and signals `an end to that old, repressive regime which identi¢ed the true meaning of a text with the animating presence of authorial intent' (Norris 1987: 219, cf. Fish 1980). According to Roland Barthes `a text is not a line of words releasing a single ``theological'' meaning (the ``message'' of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash' (Barthes 1977: 146). Once this post-modern hermeneutic is securely established the act of reading becomes a liberating experience: no longer constrained by any sense of duty

Post-modern foundations

31

to the author, or any responsibility to discern the truth of the text, we are free to mould interpretations that meet our own needs and desires. The modern construction of humanity reverts to dust and ashes as the new-born postmodern body of desire rises phoenix-like from its grave: `the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author' (148).

Knowledge and power According to Charles Taylor the di¡erences between modernity and postmodernity are not as clear cut as they ¢rst appear: as we have already noted, he views the underlying ideal of post-modern philosophy as a variant on the modern ideal of unconstrained freedom (Taylor 1992a: 489). It is certainly di¤cult to argue against the view that freedom from constraint constitutes one of the essential drivers of post-modern thought. Where modernity sought emancipation from the tyranny of an arbitrary deity, so post-modernity seeks freedom from the tyranny of the human subject. If the primary task of post-modernity is to secure our freedom to recreate our identities according to our personal preferences, inclinations and desires, then the legacy of structuralism leaves post-modernity with one ¢nal challenge: if it is true that we do not control language, but that language controls us, what is to prevent language itself becoming yet another repressive authority working to undermine our freedom? According to Foucault the fact that language is neither connected to the order-of-things, nor under the control of God or the human subject, means that the knowledge claims embodied in language take on a life of their own. Knowledge becomes rei¢ed into a self-perpetuating entity that assumes control of human experience. Foucault attempted to carry out what he termed an `archaeology of knowledge', digging up the past to expose the powerstructures complicit in its historical development (Foucault 1974, 1989). His research led him to reject the modern belief in progress and deny that the historical growth of knowledge may legitimately be represented as a gradual unfolding of truth and meaning. History, according to Foucault, is marked not by linear progress, but by a directionless nomadic wandering. Consequently he regards the past as dislocated from, and hence irrelevant to, the present. The meta-narratives constructed by modernity are simply myths created by those in positions of power, myths that ride roughshod over the disempowered and silence the voices of dissent. Knowledge is wrapped up in the local, provisional, relativistic and partial, and the so-called `progress' of knowledge is dependent upon changes in forms of discourse brought about by the non-discursive practices of society. Our understanding of the world, that is to say, is driven and controlled by power relations and authoritarian social structures. In Madness and Civilisation Foucault presents an idiosyncratic history of the development of western attitudes to mental illness (Foucault 1971). He begins

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by identifying a pre-Enlightenment dialogue with madness, marked by toleration and respect for the `holy fool': there is wisdom in the madness of Cervantes' Don Quixote, and Shakespeare allows the Fool to see through the blindness and stupidity of King Lear. It is precisely because the Renaissance embraced a healthy suspicion of the power of human reason that it was able to approach madness with an open mind. `For Foucault, the philosophy and literature of the Renaissance accorded a certain privilege to madness. Folly held pride of place in the catalogue of human weakness. It held this place because of the ambiguity and precariousness a¥icting all forms of human endeavour' (Boyne 1990: 22). Foucault traces the successive stages through which modernity sought to control and marginalise madness, initially through regimes of incarceration and surveillance, and later through the `humanitarian' treatment of mental illness within emerging medical and therapeutic practices. He suggests that in the modern era respect for madness, previously rooted in an acceptance of the limits of human reason, is replaced by a coercive discourse that equates madness with an absence of reason and elects to speak at rather than with the insane. As a result conversations between reason and madness are transformed into statements by the sane about the insane. Foucault argues that modernity gave birth to a series of power-structures and social systems designed to organise, rationalise and sanitise `normal' society. This resulted in the construction of rational accounts of madness that legitimated the drawing of a line of demarcation between the mad and the sane and led to the treatment of the former as an aberration. Our `knowledge' of madness is the result of the desire of the majority to protect themselves from the perceived threat posed by a minority: hence knowledge is exposed as the child of power and reason as the sibling of authority. Foucault contrasts the `space of pure vision' where `madness possesses a primitive force of revelation', with `the whole humanist tradition' where `madness is set within the universe of discourse' (Foucault 1971: 38f ). Knowledge is entirely arbitrary: the product of self-perpetuating power-structures that have long since passed beyond our control, grounded in self-referential linguistic systems that pre-determine who we are and what we might become. As a consequence our freedom is deeply compromised, the emancipatory promise of modern reason having been e¡ectively undermined by modern technologies of power. It is clear that if the freedom craved by post-modernity is to be realised then the regimes of language that serve to de¢ne, control and identify us must be deconstructed.

Deconstructing the text Language, once detached from speech-acts ^ whether human or divine ^ and separated from any necessary relationship with the natural world, takes on a self-perpetuating, invasive and hegemonic life of its own. It follows that

Post-modern foundations

33

human freedom cannot be established simply by rejecting the authenticity of our objective knowledge and subjective experiences: language itself must be rendered impotent. Hence the deconstruction of language lies at the very heart of post-modernity. Most post-modern philosophers resist describing deconstruction as a `method', since this might imply a process or technique leading to the revelation of truth or discovery of meaning. Deconstruction is not intended as a hermeneutic tool of interpretation: on the contrary, its task is to resist any such process. The act of deconstructing a text seeks to demonstrate its inherent instability and contingency, thereby making it impossible for the reader to slip back into modernist modes of thought. Deconstruction administers the coup de graªce to modernity: having dislocated language from any necessary connection with the human experience or the external world, postmodern philosophy turns to deconstruction to demonstrate the internal incoherence of language itself. How does deconstruction work? In spite of the denial that deconstruction constitutes a `method' it is possible to identify at least six key procedures employed by post-modern philosophers. First, the rejection of `binary opposites'. Logo-centric thinking, according to Derrida, is dependent upon the use of binary opposites such as mind/body, subject/object, male/female, sacred/secular, sense/sensibility, speech/writing, surface/depth and central/marginal. Such distinctions encourage super¢cial arguments based on simplistic either/or choices and constrain the way we think by inviting us to privilege one side of the equation and marginalise the other. The result, all too often, is confrontation, aggression and intellectual violence. In religious debate, for example, the employment of binary opposites suggests that there is a stark choice to be made between orthodoxy and heresy, true believer and in¢del ^ a distinction that invites bigotry, intolerance and persecution. By deconstructing this binary code we are no longer forced to separate the saint from the sinner, the sacred from the profane. This has at least two positive consequences: on the one hand a key source of religious violence is undermined, on the other our emancipation from the religious imperative to classify, separate and marginalise leaves us free to wrestle with God in the ambiguous and spiritually creative borderlands that subsequently emerge (Sutherland 1984). Second, the hermeneutics of `intertextuality'. Texts continually overlap with other texts, words with other words, in an endless web of language without end or centre: there is no brick wall at the end of the universe, no still point from which everything £ows. We can only ever engage with this web of language from within, since it is impossible to step outside and view it as a whole. Consequently our understanding of a text will always take place with reference to other texts. Take, for example, the following line from the Song of Songs in the Hebrew Bible: `My love is a sachet of myrrh / lying between my breasts' (Song of Songs 1:13). The reception of this verse will take on

34

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di¡erent nuances of meaning as one reads it alongside the liturgy of a marriage service, an advertisement for perfume, a scholarly biblical commentary, a romantic novel, a pornographic magazine, a feminist tract or a biological textbook. Crucially, none of these complementary texts possesses either the power or the authority to direct us towards a `correct' interpretation. Third, the procedure of `grafting'. Here intertextuality is directly imposed on the text itself, the philosopher deliberately grafting one text upon another during the act of writing. In Derrida's Glas, for example, a discussion of Hegel on the left-hand column of the page is grafted onto a discussion of Jean Genet on the right-hand column (Derrida 1986). The only clue to the interpretation of each text is Derrida's implied, if di¤cult to avoid, editorial suggestion that the texts may be used to interpret one another. `Constantly at work in this book is the problematic relation between the two columns or texts . . . While reading one column you are reminded that the gist lies elsewhere, in the relation between columns if not in the other column itself ' (Culler 1983: 136). The result is that meaning is suspended and made problematic by allowing a text to subvert, and be subverted by, the text it has been grafted onto. Susan Handelmann has noted how the process of grafting has a¤nities with rabbinical interpretations of Hebrew scripture, in the form of layers of marginal annotations that eventually became more extensive than the original text, a process also at work in modern scholarly biblical commentaries (Handelmann 1982). The major di¡erence between modern scholarly commentaries on the one hand, and post-modern grafting on the other, is that the former seeks to draw out the true meaning of the text, whilst the latter seeks to disrupt such a search and reveal it as an unobtainable ideal. Handelmann suggests that rabbinic interpretation is actually closer to the latter, serving to reinforce Jewish belief in the mystery and alterity of God. Fourth, the identi¢cation of di¡e¨rence. The French verb di¡e¨rer carries two meanings: to be distinctive or di¡erent, and to defer, delay or postpone. Whenever we read a text we encounter an overabundance of meaning: ever changing, ever transforming, ever metamorphosing. In this situation we assign distinctive meanings to words, phrases and sentences, whilst at the same time accepting the necessity of deferring alternative designations. As a result meaning is simultaneously present and absent. Since language has no ¢xed foundation, no secure denotation, no core essence, the act of reading is a process of continuously passing in and out of understanding. A text will mean di¡erent things to di¡erent people, taking on con£icting nuances of meaning in di¡erent cultural contexts and social situations, so that we both understand what is written yet have no real idea what it means. Fifth, the placing of a word or phrase sous-rature or `under erasure'. This involves writing and then crossing it out, but in a way in which the original text can still be read. Thus we place Derrida sous-rature here: the name is now simultaneously present and absent, the bearer of meaning and the bearer of

Post-modern foundations

35

the denial of meaning. Who exactly is Derrida? Every time we think we have grasped an aspect of his thought or personality it immediately £ows away, like sand through our ¢ngers. `Meaning is scattered or dispersed along the whole chain of signi¢ers; it cannot be easily nailed down, it is never fully present in any one sign alone, but it is rather a kind of constant £ickering of presence and absence together' (Sarup 1988: 35f ). Jean-Luc Marion writes that `we can glimpse God only in the intermittent half-times of our idolatries' (Marion 1995: 108). To name God is inevitably idolatrous, but not to name God is an impossible option, at least for the theologian. In placing God sousrature Marion simultaneously a¤rms and denies the theological meaning of the word. A phrase under erasure is both necessary and inadequate at the same time: we cannot understand it, yet cannot understand without it. Sixth, the discovery of the `trace'. The meaning of a sign or symbol is determined not only by its presence in the text, that is, by what it explicitly says or identi¢es, but also by the trace of that which is not present. We must learn to treat words as tracks, footprints, imprints that point beyond themselves to something di¡erent, something other than that suggested by the surface meaning of the text. The self-designation of, for example, some forms of gay writing as `queer' discourse and black hip-hop artists as `niggers', functions to celebrate the identity of members of those particular groups whilst simultaneously pointing to prejudice that such celebration seeks to challenge. The terms embody political, social and moral stances that are crystal clear precisely because they retain traces of alternative meanings. Such traces are not always, as in the examples o¡ered here, deliberately ironic: the key point is that the words on the printed page do not limit the meaning of a text; on the contrary, the traces of alternative vocabularies open up a wealth of di¡erent meanings. The cumulative e¡ect of these various deconstructive techniques is simple: to deny language any role as a bearer of truth, thereby ridding it of its power and authority. Where structuralism insisted that language plays games with us, so post-structuralism celebrates our new-found freedom to play games with language. The deconstruction of language leaves post-modern readers free to create their own readings, driven by their personal desires, preferences and inclinations. This chapter has suggested that post-modernity is rooted in the rejection of modern meta-narratives, narratives deemed untenable by virtue of their reliance on the outmoded principles of onto-theology, logo-centrism and the metaphysics of presence. According to post-modern philosophers the modernist project of a¤rming the power of human reason in order to emancipate humanity from authoritarian economies of power is no longer tenable. The modern age has simply replaced the tyranny of a despotic deity with the tyranny of human reason. By proclaiming the `death of the author' and the end of the hegemony of human thought and action, exposing the intimate

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relationship between knowledge and power, and deconstructing the authority of language itself, post-modernity seeks a radical emancipation from all constraint. How are we to evaluate this post-modern project? Charles Taylor is adamant that `nothing emerges from [this] £ux worth a¤rming, and so what in fact comes to be celebrated is the deconstructing power itself, the prodigious power of subjectivity to undo all the potential allegiances which might bind it' (Taylor 1992a: 489). Is it then simply a case of replacing the tyranny of objective knowledge with the tyranny of subjective opinion? For the post-modernist the very act of posing such a distinctively modern question con¢rms the blinkered nature of a modernity singularly unaware that its foundations have long since been swept away. It is at this point that the conversation frequently comes to an end: modernity and post-modernity appear to constitute two distinctive and incommensurable paradigms, two mutually exclusive world-views so at odds with one another that meaningful communication between them is impossible. Such mutual antipathy, however, achieves very little: there is much to be gained by striving to keep the conversation going. This, then, is the task of the next chapter.

Chapter 4

Alterity and anti-realism

Post-modernism abandons `the search for over-arching or triumphalist myths, narratives or frameworks', displays `a willingness to combine symbols from disparate codes or frameworks of meaning', and celebrates `spontaneity, fragmentation, super¢ciality, irony and playfulness' (Beckford 1992: 19). James Beckford's characterisation of post-modernity raises two questions that form the foci of this chapter: `What happens when the full force of deconstruction is brought to bear on the edi¢ce of modernity?' and `What, if anything, does post-modernity seek to put in its place?' We will begin by examining the deconstruction of our three modern meta-narratives, then suggest two contrasting readings of the positive substance of post-modernity: a closed anti-realistic philosophy of identity, and an open alteristic philosophy of di¡erence.

Deconstructing naturalism The post-modern deconstruction of naturalism draws directly on critiques already ¢rmly established within modernity itself. Romanticism and postmodernism are in broad agreement that `scienti¢c knowledge does not represent the totality of knowledge' (Lyotard 1984: 7). Both reject forms of `scientism' that regard scientists as the high priests and mediators of the material universe: identifying its structures, laying bare its laws, and developing increasingly sophisticated technologies of manipulation and control. Romanticism does not, on the whole, doubt the theoretical and practical success of science in, for example, the ¢elds of transport, medicine and information technology. The problem lies elsewhere, in the fact that the scienti¢c commitment to neutrality and objectivity leaves the scientist blind to the fundamental moral and spiritual questions raised by the production of these new technologies. Devoid of guidance from any substantive value system, science has little choice but to abandon its cherished belief that it can guide and control human destiny: the logic of naturalism reduces reality to a deterministic chain of physical cause and e¡ect, transforms technological progress into a cancerous auto-generation, and undermines any notion of

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human freedom. Naturalism locks modernity into a rei¢ed and disenchanted world driven by a super¢cial eudemonistic economy of happiness-pluspower, driven and ¢nanced by the ideological fetishes of western capitalism. Perhaps the ultimate irony here is that naturalism continues to provide those who seek to destroy the self-perpetuating system of global capitalism with the tools and technology with which to mount their campaigns of terror. This romantic critique was taken up by members of the Frankfurt School, who argued that the Enlightenment `generated unprecedented systems of oppression' as a direct result of `its belief in the externalised, objective, truth about individuals and society' (Williams 2002: 4, cf. Horkheimer and Adorno 1972). It is clear from this that modernity recognised the limitations of naturalism long before post-modernity appeared on the scene. The fundamental di¡erence between romanticism and post-modernity lies not in their shared understanding of the nihilistic threat posed by the coalition of science-plustechnology, but rather in their respective responses to this threat: where romanticism is content simply to forge a supplementary counter-culture, post-modernity seeks to bring about its wholesale deconstruction. Paul Feyerabend's Farewell to Reason represents the post-modern reaction to science at its most extreme (Feyerabend 1987). He advocates an epistemological anarchism that denies the primacy of scienti¢c research and views it as simply one amongst countless possible ways of engaging with reality. In e¡ect Feyerabend deconstructs reason itself, making it impossible to adjudicate between science and pseudo-science: alchemy and astrology take their place alongside molecular biology and quantum physics as legitimate intellectual enterprises. Despite a super¢cial popularity, particularly amongst followers of the various neo-romantic new age movements, it is di¤cult to read Feyerabend's position as anything other than the victory of crass rhetoric and dogmatic naivety over any sustained attempt to grapple intelligently with the substantive and theoretical issues raised by the scienti¢c enterprise. Whatever its limitations and shortcomings, it is apparent to all but the most blinkered observers that science `works'. The brute fact that we can perform open heart surgery and journey to the moon, while alchemy remains unable to turn base metal into gold, is enough to undermine Feyerabend's musings. In stark contrast Richard Rorty has no time for such anti-intellectualism, recognising that the problem lies not in scienti¢c reasoning itself, but rather in the elevation of such reasoning to the status of an exclusive and allembracing meta-narrative. He seeks to undermine the tyranny of science not by taking a sledge-hammer to it, as Feyerabend does, but by adopting the strategy of marginalising and limiting its signi¢cance. Rorty is prepared to concede the basic results of modern science and accept a broadly naturalistic world-view in which the order-of-things is reduced to the sum of the chain of cause and e¡ect in the material world. This, however, is a truth that he ¢nds

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fundamentally uninteresting. Even if all our actions are ultimately determined by a causal network, the degree of contingency and £exibility within the natural order remains so great that our sense of freedom and moral responsibility is neither undermined nor diminished. Rorty contends that the success of science has shown us that there is nothing fundamentally mysterious about reality: there are no hidden essences, ultimate truths or divine meanings lurking behind the brute fact of the material world. Science `helps us avoid the self-deception of thinking that we possess a deep, hidden, metaphysically signi¢cant nature which makes us ``irreducibly'' di¡erent from inkwells or atoms' (Rorty 1980: 373). It follows that the time-honoured quest for the `meaning of life' rests on a categorical mistake. By marginalising the scienti¢c enterprise Rorty seeks to create the space in which we can draw on our moral, aesthetic and spiritual sensibilities to re-imagine and re-create society. The post-modern good life consists of the `realisation of utopias, and the envisaging of still further utopias, as an endless process ^ an endless, proliferating realisation of Freedom, rather than a convergence towards an already existing Truth' (Rorty 1989: xvi). Since we are no longer driven by the need to discover ultimate truth we are free to hold our beliefs ironically and playfully, thereby dissipating the cruelty inherent in forms of religious and secular fanaticism. Rorty here adopts the familiar modernist distinction between fact and value, assuming that values are human creations that we must take responsibility for, despite the fact that there seems to be no good reason for preferring one set of beliefs over another. The result of this thoroughgoing relativism is that Rorty's utopian world of free-£owing value takes on the very same anti-intellectual traits that Feyerabend sought to impose on the realm of scienti¢c fact. Mesmerised by the legacy of modernity, Rorty reinforces the gulf between fact and value, further polarises the distinction between sense and sensibility, and consequently misses the opportunity of transforming rationality into a wisdom capable of re¢ning our understanding of the relationship between science, morality and spirituality. As Israel Sche¥er observes, if `the growth of science and technology creates radical human problems, surely we need not only technical sophistication but also deeper knowledge of human a¡airs in order to cope with them' (Sche¥er 1989: 60).

Deconstructing romanticism Rorty's celebration of our freedom to create moral, aesthetic and spiritual utopias leads us directly to the meta-narrative of romanticism, in particular to its claim that the authenticity of our values may be con¢rmed by appealing to our inner feelings and sensibilities. The post-modern attack on romanticism, like its critique of naturalism, draws directly on concerns ¢rst raised within modernity itself. In particular it was Freud's assertion that our conscious and sub-conscious minds are frequently at odds with one another

40

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that dealt a near fatal blow to the legacy of romanticism. The recognition that we are vulnerable to unintentional self-deception seriously undermines Descartes' claim that certain knowledge is grounded in self-awareness, Kant's insistence that we must have the courage to trust our own reason, and romanticism's faith in the veracity of our immediate feelings and experiences. This modern challenge to the legacy of romanticism ushered in, once again, the spectre of Cartesian anxiety: the resurgent fear of chaos, meaninglessness and solipsistic isolation emerged as a characteristic feature of the twentieth century, as is clear from much of the literature of the time (Camus 1983, Kafka 1961, Mann 1971, Sartre 1965). As my diminishing sense of identity becomes a source of anxiety so I am likely to begin to doubt the authenticity of my personal experience, especially when measured against universal standards of truth. The danger here is that such an eruption of existential angst will result in aggressive attempts at self-assertion designed to recover a secure sense of identity. This danger became a political reality as romanticism forged a close bond with totalitarianism in the 1930s (Berlin 1997: 553¡ ). The romantic myth of fallen society, coupled with the promise of a return to a golden age of natural goodness, o¡ered an ideological framework ruthlessly exploited by fascism. The possibility of gaining a renewed sense of collective identity, through the struggle to establish a pristine utopia by ridding society of its infected elements, proved irresistible to many. Building on this modern critique of romanticism, the post-modern psycholinguist Julia Kristeva suggests that Freud's deconstruction of our introspective certainties demands a rethinking of the way we attend to our subjective experiences (Kristeva 1987, 1991). Her discussion focuses on two issues: the relationships between experience and language, and between ourselves and others-in-community. Language, she argues, is a dynamic medium through which meaning and identity are negotiated, both introspectively and within the communities we belong to. Rather than acting as a threat to our security, Freud's discovery of the unconscious constitutes a liberating event, emancipating us from the tyrannical authority of our subjective inner feelings. No longer forced to strive after the impossible goal of establishing a stable personal identity, we are free to embrace the chaotic depths of our primal desires and transcend self-obsession through an existential encounter with Otherness. According to Kristeva the dissolution of the modern construct of selfhood creates a space in which love and freedom, emancipated from the tyranny of logo-centric thinking and linked instead to the alterity of both ourselves and those around us, have the opportunity to £ourish. Kristeva's celebration of the therapeutic value of the collapse of the authority of our inner feelings is deeply in£uenced by Georges Bataille, whose work had a signi¢cant impact on the ¢rst generation of post-modern philosophers (Bataille 1985, 1988). He invites us to abandon our worship of subjectivity, and reject the tyranny of the modern ideals of personal development and self-ful¢lment. If I am to engage authentically with the world then

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I must accept that life is inherently mysterious, and consequently be prepared to risk abandoning the modernist search for a coherent and stable identity. Bataille welcomes Cartesian anxiety, embracing it as a positive cause for celebration. Since the desire for certainty can only constrain and limit, we must seize every opportunity to celebrate the contingency and uncertainty of the world. Where Descartes feared that he might drown in the torrent of meaninglessness that threatened to engulf him, Bataille invites us to experience the thrill of riding the anarchic white-water rapids of postmodern culture. It was Bataille who introduced into post-modern thought the recurring themes ^ noted in the previous chapter ^ of the `death of the author' and the `death of the subject'. In our appraisal of the world we must take leave of the myth that there is any stable authorial intention behind the objects and texts we encounter, whilst simultaneously accepting that, as readers and interpreters, we also lack any meaningful identity. Bataille thus invites us to a banquet of excess and plenitude, insisting that we must have the courage to transgress boundaries and immerse ourselves in the mystery, glory and wonder of creation. Craig James captures something of the spirit of Bataille's Dionystic vision: Like some crazy shaman, he dares us to slip beneath our masks, to strip naked in response to the challenge to plunge into otherness (alte¨rite¨ ), while at the same time lucidly confronting the intense anguish that this movement brings . . . This violent revelation of sacred continuity, this unknown, involves a total negation of consciousness: language and clarity slip away in the plenitude of the impossible. ( James 1997: 5, 12) At the heart of the post-modern deconstruction of romanticism lies the rejection of an archic striving for the ultimate meaning and purpose of life and its replacement by an an/archic celebration of our freedom to cultivate desire for its own sake. In e¡ect the discourses of morality, aesthetics and spirituality previously marginalised by naturalism are embraced, but only after they have been dislocated from the romantic concern for truth.

Deconstructing liberalism The twin principles of freedom and tolerance, which provide the moral backbone of modernity, £ow directly from the liberal recognition of the limits of human understanding. If modernity actually had the intellectual game wrapped up, if it had indeed discovered the ultimate meta-narrative, then there would be no need for a meta-narrative whose primary function is to stabilise a pluralistic culture in which there is no common agreement on a range of fundamental issues. The conclusion that post-modernity is highly selective in its reading of modernity, especially in its claims that modernity is

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blind to the contingent nature of human understanding, appears di¤cult to avoid. Indeed it is easier to present post-modernity as the culmination and ful¢lment of the liberal tradition than as the agent of its deconstruction. This is re£ected in Seyla Benhabib's observation that `postmodernism presupposes a super-liberalism, more pluralistic, more tolerant, more open to the right of di¡erence and otherness' (Benhabib 1992: 16). This position is developed by Richard Rorty, who follows Judith Shklar in de¢ning liberals as `people who think that cruelty is the worst thing we do' (Rorty 1989: xv). He goes on to suggest that the post-modern consolidation of liberalism constitutes the `selfcanceling and self-ful¢lling triumph of the Enlightenment': self-cancelling because the totalitarian dream of reason is undercut by post-modern relativism, triumphant because the promise of a genuinely humanitarian society is ful¢lled in the post-modern age (57). Rorty's post-modern recasting of liberalism celebrates the `liberal ironist', `the sort of person who faces up to the contingency of his or her own most central beliefs and desires ^ someone su¤ciently historicist and nominalist to have abandoned the idea that these central beliefs and desires refer back to something beyond the reach of time and chance' (xv). The twin principles of freedom and tolerance function here not ^ as originally intended by liberalism's founding father John Locke ^ as the basis of an interim ethic designed to establish the conditions necessary to support an ongoing search for ultimate truth, but as the ethical foundations of a utopian post-modern society emancipated from con£ict because it has rid itself of any divisive commitment to truth. For the more radical wing of post-modernity, however, liberalism does indeed constitute a pervasive and authoritarian meta-narrative. The assertion that we are free to believe whatever we like provided we tolerate the beliefs of others, it is claimed, is so ingrained in contemporary western culture that we are unable to respond to alternative moral systems as anything other than direct threats to the established order. Modernity, that is to say, turns a pragmatic interim ethic into a non-negotiable world-view policed by an economy of political correctness, and as a result it is unable to be genuinely open to the alterity of the Other. Instead of genuinely celebrating cultural di¡erence, liberalism colonises non-liberal moral discourse into its own exclusive frame of reference, repeating on an intellectual level an earlier history of western economic, military and political imperialism. This, broadly speaking, is the position adopted by Edward Said, a leading exponent of post-colonial theory and criticism, whose post-modern credentials, as Christopher Norris notes, `stand worlds apart from the self-engrossed frivolities of current postmodernist fashion' (Norris 1993: 70, cf. Said 1978, 1993). Taking his lead from Foucault, Said argues that all `knowledge is tinged and impressed with, violated by, the gross political fact', and that as a result the Other is e¡ectively disempowered and misrepresented by occidental reason (Said 1978: 11). Liberalism, despite its expressed desire to remain open to alternative discourses, has proved itself unable to embrace

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them without ¢rst enclosing them within its own interpretative framework. As a result it has become complicit in the process of rei¢cation, through which the west constructs images and stories both `of ' and `for' nonwesterners. This `orientalism' projects non-occidental culture as `other-thanthe-west', rather than as Other on its own terms. Thus, as Gavin Flood observes, neo-colonial discourse `contrasts the East as feminine, irrational, exotic, sensual, female, despotic and backward, with the West as masculine, rational, sober, moral, male, democratic and progressive' (Flood 1999: 231). By enclosing alternative narratives within the hegemony of its own moral discourse liberalism asserts paternalistic control over the Other, projecting its own understanding as to what constitutes Otherness and how Others should behave and think. A concrete example of this process is to be found in the interpretation of Islam o¡ered by some western politicians following the events of 11 September 2001. In distinguishing between `authentic' peaceloving Muslims and `inauthentic' Islamic fundamentalists they e¡ectively imposed liberal moral categories on Islam. Regardless of the legitimacy or illegitimacy of this distinction, the failure of these politicians to engage with the discourse of Islamic theology, or to attend to how Muslims themselves were reading the situation, meant that ^ however inadvertently ^ they e¡ectively assumed the right to interpret Islam on behalf of Muslims, and did so in a manner that served their own political ends. Said's turn to post-modernity as a means of giving voice to the dispossessed is closely aligned with the position adopted by Derrida. As Silberstein notes, `the basic starting point for his [Derrida's] deconstructive activity is the concern for the voices of alterity that have been silenced, the voices of those Others who have been marginalized, expelled, cast out, or excluded' (Silberstein 1996: 336). He goes on to refer to Said's insistence that we learn to read history `with a simultaneous awareness both of the metropolitan history that is narrated and of those other histories against which (and together with) the dominating discourse acts' (336, quoting Said 1993: 43). Establishing a critical awareness of the power-structures of liberalism will `not only allow us to discriminate one culture from another, but also enable us to see the extent to which cultures are humanly made structures of both authority and participation, benevolent in what they include, incorporate and validate, less benevolent in what they exclude and demote' (Said 1993: 15). It is important to note here that Said's attack on liberalism does not constitute a fundamental rejection of liberal values per se, merely an attack on the way such values have been allowed to act as a buttress for occidental culture. In e¡ect Said is calling for a radical liberalism that drives freedom and tolerance in the direction of the recognition and celebration of alterity. It is clear, then, that post-modernity enjoys an ambiguous relationship with liberalism. The crucial issue is whether the liberal meta-narrative is approached in a hard sense as a non-negotiable world-view, or in a soft sense as a provisional ethic designed to enable con£icting voices to communicate

44

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e¡ectively with one another. According to Rorty post-modernity ful¢ls and radicalises the hard form of liberalism by establishing the non-negotiable conditions in which we are free to construct our own private visions of utopia. For Said this hard version of liberalism simply serves to veil the face of the Other and silence the voices of those whose life-world and morality is not liberal. His pragmatic honesty, in sharp contrast to Rorty's idealistic utopianism, argues that the voice of the Other must be heard on its own terms. This raises a fundamental question that will be the focus of our discussion in the rest of this chapter: `Does the contrast between the respective positions of Rorty and Said suggest two contrasting trajectories within postmodernity itself, one seeking to avoid totalitarianism by insisting on our freedom to create our own private realities, the other seeking to avoid totalitarianism by reminding us of our moral responsibility to attend without prejudice to the voices of alterity and di¡erence?'

Brave new worlds Our exploration of the deconstruction of the three foundational metanarratives of modernity has thrown up some interesting results. In the ¢rst place there is unanimity regarding the need to reject the absolutism of science, though disagreement as to whether this requires the blanket rejection of the scienti¢c enterprise or merely the marginalisation of claims that it is able to account for the whole of reality. Secondly, there is a clear recognition that the various discourses of moral, aesthetic and spiritual value, provided they are ¢rst separated from the universalistic conceits of modernity, must be placed centre stage in the new post-modern order. Thirdly there is a consistent a¤rmation of the central importance of the liberal principles of freedom and tolerance, though there is disagreement as to whether they should function as a justi¢cation of our freedom to create our own personal utopian worlds, or as a constant reminder of the need to remain open to the voice of the Other. The key conclusion to be drawn from this is that the popular assumption that post-modernity seeks to bring about the wholesale deconstruction of modernity is misplaced. Instead we have observed a complex renegotiation of the nature, status and signi¢cance of the three modern narratives we have chosen to focus on, a renegotiation driven by a concern to undermine the supposed totalitarian thrust of modernity in order to maximise human freedom. On the one hand the narrative of scienti¢c naturalism is denied any privileged status, while on the other non-absolutist versions of romanticism and liberalism are placed centre stage. If this reading is correct then postmodernity is best read as an attempt to establish a radical non-totalitarian version of the romantic/liberal counter-culture that £ourished in the 1960s, a counter-culture stripped of its utopian idealism and revolutionary politicisa-

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tion and brought into a synergetic relationship with the consumer culture of global capitalism. What sense are we to make of this realignment? How are we to respond to this culture of radical plurality, diversity and contingency? How are we to £ourish within it? Before examining post-modern responses to these questions it is important that we remind ourselves that there are those who simply reject post-modernity in its entirety. Norris, for example, bemoans the `sublime naivety and lack of historical perspective' of post-modern thinkers `busily engaged in reducing all truth-claims to a species of rhetorical imposition, assimilating history to the realm of narrative (or ¢ctive) contrivance, and rubbishing ``enlightenment'' values and beliefs in whatever residual form' (Norris 1993: 2). His position is representative of those critics who ¢nd little of lasting intellectual value in post-modernity, and consequently elect either to ignore it, or to engage in a critical discourse intent on subverting it. We will take up these criticisms at a later stage. Here our concern will be with the responses of those who discern value in the post-modern critique of modernity. Post-modernity is concerned to preserve freedom and avoid the imposition of inappropriate and narrowly conceived truth claims. In doing so it draws on two distinct traditions that, for all their di¡erences, share a common belief that we are unable to fully comprehend the order-of-things. The ¢rst of these traditions is realistic in a¤rming that there is a real world out there waiting to be discovered, and that there is ultimate meaning and purpose inherent in the order-of-things. However, this realism is tempered by the recognition that, given the ¢nite nature of human reason, we have only a limited ability to fully understand reality: the problem is not with reality itself, but with our ability to comprehend it. The second tradition is idealistic, contending ^ on the basis of idealism's insistence of the primacy of mind over matter ^ that all talk of a `real world' beyond our subjective experiences is misplaced. This poses a fundamental question of post-modernity: `Does its scepticism about the limits of human knowledge entail a realistic denial that we can properly grasp the structures of reality, or an anti-realistic denial that there is such a thing as reality?' This tension between realism and antirealism is further illuminated by Graham Ward's identi¢cation of two contrasting ways of interpreting post-modernity: as a historical movement passing beyond the modern era into an entirely new philosophical epoch; or as a `moment' or `condition' within modernity itself, o¡ering a means of engaging with the world that functions as a supplement to modernity, guiding and enriching it from within (Ward 1997: 585¡ ). Ward's ¢rst suggestion re£ects the views of those for whom post-modernity ^ as the label implies ^ marks an epochal transition beyond the modern era, a transition that brings about the wholesale rejection of the Enlightenment and surrounds talk of the progress of post-modernity with an aura of inevitability: the old order has passed away for ever, and we are left with no choice

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but to live our lives in the brave new world of post-modernity, a world utterly incommensurable with the discredited legacy of modernity. This approach tends to embrace a thoroughgoing anti-realism: since there is no `real world' out there for us to discover we are free to abandon the pursuit of truth and construct our own ¢ctional realities on the basis of personal desire, inclination and preference. Such a reading implies that post-modernity constitutes its own particular anti-realistic meta-narrative, one that oversees the deconstruction of the realistic meta-narratives of modernity. Post-modernity here is in serious danger of self-contradiction, identifying itself as the metanarrative that proclaims the end of all meta-narratives, and a¤rming the truth that there is no such thing as truth. Ward's second suggestion invites us to view post-modernity as a supplement to, rather than rejection of, modernity. Here post-modernity functions as the conscience of modernity: warning it of the pitfalls of ignoring the limitations of human reason, cautioning it about the totalitarian dangers of embracing promethean meta-narratives, providing a constant reminder that reality is always one step beyond our ability to understand it, and insisting on the need to remain open to the voices of alterity and di¡erence. This option does not reject realism per se, merely raises the question of the limits of our ability to fully comprehend reality. According to this point of view the post-modern moment `is composed of that which is excluded from or excess to the discourses of knowledge or the orders governing various sciences, and the authorities which police them' (587). This distinction is crucial to the argument developed in the rest of this book. There is, it will be argued, a fundamental di¡erence between a `closed' anti-realistic post-modern world-view which insists that we are free to create our own individual utopias on the basis of an economy of desire, and an `open' post-modernity, understood as a cultural and intellectual impulse operating within the boundaries of modernity to warn of the dangers of overstating the powers of human reason and insisting that we remain open to voices of di¡erence. In the rest of this chapter we will explore the work of Jean Baudrillard as a representative of a closed anti-realistic version of postmodernism, and present the writings of Emmanuel Levinas as representative of an open version of post-modernity committed to keeping alive the voice of the Other.

Baudrillard and anti-realism Baudrillard follows Lyotard in o¡ering an analysis of the transition from a manufacturing economy to one driven by the production, exchange and storage of information (Baudrillard 1994, 2001, cf. Lane 2000). Our culture, he argues, has been radically transformed by the electronic technology of mass communication: television and internet, cable and satellite, fax and

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e-mail. We are engulfed in a £ood of media messages, saturated with information, awash with knowledge, swamped by images. This plethora of signs and symbols is open to multiple interpretations, making it impossible to look beyond them to any substantial reality or lasting truth. Consequently we can no longer view language as related to any actual order-of-things, but must see it merely as part of a capitalist power struggle for consumer attention and audience ratings in which linguistic promiscuity reigns. Since the link between language and reality has been broken we are faced with a random series of free-£oating signs that no longer have the power of representation. Baudrillard approaches such signs as self-referencing `simulations' and `simulacra'. In everyday parlance the simulation of, for example, a computer-generated model of the £ight-deck of a jumbo jet or a game of soccer seeks to re-create as authentically as possible some aspect of the real world by producing a virtual reality that imitates the real thing. Baudrillard's use of the term departs from common usage by introducing the negative notions of imitation and counterfeit, thereby emphasising the radical di¡erence between the simulation and that which is simulated. His basic claim is that there is no reality, only simulation. Simulations are simulacra: not the images of things, not even shadowy likenesses, but rather deceptive substitutes rooted in ¢ction and pretence. A simulacrum takes on a life of its own, becoming `real' in its own right and having no need to refer back to any bed-rock reality. Baudrillard is promoting not a virtual reality but a `hyperreality' that denies any genuine di¡erence between truth and ¢ction. This hyper-reality constitutes a linguistic idealism in which language is the sum of reality, reality the sum of language. Hence Baudrillard's startling claim that the Gulf War never took place. Given his love of irony and desire to shock there is presumably no need to read him literally here: he is not denying that people actually su¡ered and died during this `¢ctitious' con£ict. Rather he is claiming that there is no way in which we can get behind the media images of the war and establish what `really' happened. The Gulf War is nothing more than the sum of the media images it generated. Baudrillard has no time for `an epistemology that searches out the higher elevations of truth, exercises a depth reading, or tries to penetrate reality in order to uncover the essence of meaning' (Aronowitz and Giroux 1991: 65). How ought we to respond to a hyper-reality that leaves us enveloped in the never-ending excess of signs and symbols, with no means of adjudicating between them or passing beyond them to some more substantial reality? Here Baudrillard makes a virtue out of necessity: the appropriate response to the fact that we ¢nd ourselves thrown into such a world is not to attempt to understand it, but to consume its rich resources. Baudrillard advocates an economy of desire in which morality is transformed into aesthetics. He invites us to experience the thrill of engaging in ever-changing sensations driven by a primal drive towards unconstrained desire, the satiation of which constitutes

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an end in itself, rather than a means to any greater end. Presumably, in the absence of any criteria for judging di¡erently, Baudrillard's understanding of the good life embraces `the ideal-type channel-hopping MTV viewer who £ips through di¡erent images at such speed that she/he is unable to chain the signi¢ers together in any meaningful narrative, he/she merely enjoys the multiphrenic intensities and sensations of the surface of the images' (Featherstone 1991: 5). As the drive to satisfy desire steers its own route through hyper-reality, so the `further you travel the more clearly you realise that the journey is all that matters' (Baudrillard 1990: 168). Reality, for Baudrillard, constitutes no more than a ¢ctional creation, a language game of the human imagination. Emancipated from the search for truth, we are free to play with language, constructing and reconstructing our private linguistic worlds as we wish, driven by nothing other than our personal desires, preferences and inclinations. One of the major criticisms of Baudrillard's position focuses on his failure to explain why the cultivation of desire, in the context of an idealised hyperrealism, does not constitute yet another closed meta-narrative. Given this heady mix of post-modern dogmatism and lack of intellectual curiosity it comes as no surprise to ¢nd Baudrillard labelled by Norris as one of the `purveyors of the shallowest, most enervating brands of present-day cultural junk-theory' (Norris 1993: 63). Perhaps the greatest irony of all is that ultimately Baudrillard's self-proclaimed radicalism does little more than underpin the economy of desire that forms the very life-blood of consumer capitalism. Our freedom to pursue our desires is at one and the same time the freedom of the advertising industry to shape, mould and stimulate them. In terms of human freedom it seems that Baudrillard is advocating a leap from the modern frying pan into a hyper-realistic ¢re.

Levinas and alterity Post-modernity is frequently assumed to be thoroughly non-realistic, wedded inextricably to the kind of linguistic idealism exempli¢ed by Baudrillard's hyper-realism. Derrida, however, is clear that post-modernity constitutes no more than a re£ective moment within modernity itself, since to a¤rm more runs the risk of turning post-modernity into just another closed metanarrative. He is not seeking to defend linguistic idealism in any shape or form. Since we cannot extricate ourselves from the £ow of language it follows that as soon as we deconstruct one version of truth another inevitably appears to take its place. The crucial issue for Derrida is not the impossibility of making statements about the way things actually are, but rather the necessity of continually acknowledging the contingent nature of such statements. The voices of deconstruction must themselves be continuously deconstructed. From Derrida's perspective Baudrillard's dogmatic faith in hyper-reality constitutes a closed world-view just as narrow as the modernity it seeks to

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overthrow. On this reading Derrida is not denying the existence of the world or rejecting the reality of things, merely insisting that our knowledge is always £eeting, provisional and unreliable. Hence at the heart of Derrida's programme of deconstruction is a two-fold hermeneutic: on the one hand a thoroughgoing scepticism directed towards the veracity of our present way of viewing reality, and on the other a call to be continually open to alterity, di¡erence and the voice of the Other. In a very real sense post-modern alterity leaves everything as it is. Deconstruction has no better theory of truth. It is a practice of reading and writing attuned to the aporias that arise in attempts to tell us the truth. It does not develop a new philosophical framework or solution but moves back and forth, with a nimbleness it hopes will prove strategic, between nonsynthesizable moments of a general economy. It moves in and out of philosophical seriousness, in and out of philosophical demonstration. Working in and around a discursive framework rather than constructing on new ground, it nevertheless seeks to produce reversals and displacements. (Culler 1983: 155) A key consequence of post-modern alterity acting as an ever-present counterpoint to the discourse of modernity is that our understanding of reality, and of our place within the order-of-things, takes on an air of mystery. Since we no longer claim to fully comprehend reality we learn to approach it with a renewed sense of awe, wonder and reverence. Thus Zygmunt Baumann argues that `post-modernity can be seen as restoring to the world what modernity, presumptuously, had taken away; as a reenchantment of the world that modernity tried to dis-enchant' (Baumann 1992: x). A major source of this post-modern philosophy of di¡erence is to be found in the work of Emmanuel Levinas (Levinas 1969, 1998, cf. Ford 1999, Peperzak 1993). His understanding of alterity is grounded on the recognition of two fundamental distinctions, between the Same (le Meªme) and the Other (l'Autre) and between Totality (Totalite¨ ) and In¢nity (In¢ni ). Levinas shows how the modern desire to establish certain knowledge results in the transformation of di¡erence into identity, thereby giving birth to a totalitarian regime of sameness that undermines any possibility of encountering the in¢nity of the Other. Modernity encounters the Other as foreign and alien, as a threat to its security and well being, and consequently strives to counter this threat by denying the alterity of the Other and establishing in its place an ideology of sameness designed to emphasise common bonds and neutralise di¡erence. Yet this can only be achieved through an authoritarianism that totalises, dominates, manipulates and controls the Other.

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Goodness, Levinas insists, is dependent on my learning to gaze into the face of the Other and recognising the space between us as sacred space. True morality lies not in the overcoming of di¡erence, but rather in the celebratory vision of di¡erence. `The experience of morality does not proceed from this vision ^ it consummates this vision' (Levinas 1969: 23). The Other is not simply a useful part of my world, a tool for con¢rming and reinforcing my sense of identity, but a radical Other that challenges my self-understanding and opens up an in¢nite range of new possibilities. `Another comes to the fore as other if and only if his or her ``appearance'' breaks, pierces, destroys the horizon of my egocentric monism, that is, when the other's invasion of my world destroys the empire in which all phenomena are, from the outset, a priori, condemned to function as moments of my universe' (Peperzak 1993: 19f ). This Other, irreducible to the sameness of my treasured world-view, brings about a disruption that challenges me to look beyond myself towards a wealth of new horizons. The Other has a moral claim on me, calling me to embrace the stranger precisely as stranger, and to approach that which stands over against me with a sense of in¢nite care and ultimate responsibility. In such a relationship of di¡erence mere tolerance is not enough, since tolerance is no more than a resigned acceptance of the need to `put up' with di¡erence, that is to say, a benign means of policing and controlling alterity. Authentic desire is not found in any drive towards the safety and security of self-grati¢cation, rather genuine desire `is the desire for the absolutely other . . . the disinterestedness of goodness' (Levinas 1969: 34f ). Authentic freedom is not freedom-from-relationship but freedom-for-relationship, since `freedom denotes the mode of remaining the same in the midst of the other' (45). Authentic morality resides in my responsibility towards the Other-asOther: `For the presence before a face, my orientation toward the Other, can lose the avidity proper to the gaze only by turning into generosity, incapable of approaching the other with empty hands' (50). Levinas' vision of humanity £ourishing through its celebratory encounters with alterity, di¡erence and otherness is worlds apart from Baudrillard's linguistic idealism. Where Baudrillard insists on the reduction of reality to the hyper-realism of linguistic appearances, Levinas insists that we resist any such premature closure of thought and instead strive to remain constantly open to the myriad possibilities currently lying beyond the scope of our understanding. Whereas when Baudrillard gazes on the face of the Other he sees nothing but the idolatrous re£ection of his own preconceived hyperrealism, Levinas encounters a sacred icon that opens up an in¢nity of new possibilities (Marion 1995). In this chapter we sought to move beyond a general description of postmodernity and engage with its substantial content, working on the assumption that the deconstruction of the modern meta-narratives of naturalism,

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romanticism and liberalism is grounded in the desire to reinforce individual autonomy and strengthen our freedom from external constraint. Given that this notion of freedom has always been a central feature of modernity itself, post-modernity is best read as a radical rea¤rmation of the distinctly modern counter-cultures of romanticism and liberalism, now dislocated from their original concern for truth. Our consideration of the substance of post-modern freedom led us to distinguish between two distinct versions of post-modernity: on the one hand we identi¢ed a closed anti-realistic postmodernity ^ exempli¢ed in Baudrillard's hyper-realism ^ which claims that we are free to create and re-create at will our own personal realities on the basis of personal inclination, preference and desire; and on the other a postmodern philosophy of di¡erence ^ exempli¢ed by the philosophy of Levinas ^ which insists that true freedom is rooted in our ability to attend to the voices of alterity and otherness. In evaluating these two versions of postmodernity we saw that an open philosophy of di¡erence is far less likely than a closed anti-realism to fall into the trap of simply replacing the metanarratives of modernity with a distinctive post-modern meta-narrative.

Chapter 5

The promise of critical realism

What sense are we to make of the contrasting readings of post-modernity presented in the previous chapter? Must we choose between a thoroughgoing anti-realism and attempts to recover a sense of wonder at the strangeness of the universe? Or are there other options available to us? This chapter will focus on the thought of a loose grouping of thinkers, working within a number of disparate disciplines, who are united in the belief that the legacy of the Enlightenment's commitment to reason has not been irredeemably damaged by the post-modern attacks on it. For convenience we will label their basic orientation `critical realism'. Though this label is borrowed from the philosophical approach of Roy Bhaskar, we will not focus exclusively on his work (Bhaskar 1993, 1994, 1997, 1998, cf. Archer et al. 1998, Collier 1994). Instead our conversation will embrace a broader range of philosophical positions and thinkers seeking to combine a modernist concern to engage with the actual order-of-things with a post-modern recognition of the limits of our knowledge and understanding (Bernstein 1983, Gadamer 1979, Gellner 1992, Habermas 1985, Held 1980, MacIntyre 1985, Nagel 1986, Norris 1993, Polanyi 1958, Taylor 1992a, Wiggershaus 1995, Williams 2002). Though the outlook of critical realism tends to resonate with that of postmodern alterity, it is clearly at odds with anti-realism. As Christopher Derrick points out, it is impossible to `prove that fundamental scepticism is untrue' (Derrick 2001: 81). This is because the sceptic's cards are marked in advance: given the a priori assumptions of anti-realism any criticism will immediately be deconstructed and dismissed as a throw-back to modernity. Derrick invites us to `imagine a man who swears that there is a world-wide conspiracy against him and interprets all public events in terms of this' (81). If we choose to embrace his point of view then any suggestion that he is mistaken is immediately ruled out of court, but if we refuse to do so then we simply become part of the conspiracy against him. `You will never win the argument: you will never prove him wrong. But you know perfectly well that you are in the presence of a paranoid' (81). Though it would be inappropriate to categorise anti-realism as a mental aberration, Derrick's argument clearly has something important to tell us. Those readers already committed

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to a sceptical anti-realism already have in place a ready-made refutation of the argument presented below, however well constructed it might be. In the face of such incommensurability all that we can hope to do is outline the contours of critical realism, and invite readers to judge for themselves whether it o¡ers a better means of engaging with the world than anti-realism. The possibility that a genuine dialogue between the two parties may not ensue, though regrettable, is perhaps not unsurprising given the circumstances. Those attracted to the hyper-realistic strand of post-modern thought, though not yet convinced believers, may like to consider two reasons why critical realism o¡ers a more viable way of making sense of the world than anti-realism. The ¢rst is that radical scepticism is untenable because it is selfcontradictory: the radical sceptic is absolutely certain of his or her radical scepticism. The closed anti-realistic reading of post-modernity, that is to say, proclaims a meta-narrative that denies the viability of meta-narratives, and in doing so a¤rms the truth that there is no such thing as truth. The second ^ to be unpacked as this chapter proceeds ^ is that critical realism o¡ers a coherent way of illuminating our experience of the world in a manner demonstrably superior to the deconstructive dynamic of post-modern scepticism. The combined force of these two arguments suggests that, just as the wise person simply `knows' when they are in the presence of paranoia, so the critical philosopher is aware that there is something fundamentally wrong with the sophistry of post-modern scepticism.

Encountering the real world For idealists it is ideas themselves that constitute the heart and measure of reality. A core dispute between idealists is whether to adopt an archic idealism in which the ¢rst principle of reality is the mind of God, as Plato and more recently Berkeley insisted, or a post-modern an/archic idealism in which the ¢rst principle(s) of reality are the imaginary signs and symbols through which we create our own ¢ctional realities, as the post-modern followers of Baudrillard a¤rm. Either way, such idealism is essentially nonrealistic, non-realists being those who deny that there is a real world `out there' existing independently of our perception of it. In sharp contrast realists a¤rm the existence of just such a mind-independent reality: a real world that enjoys an objective existence regardless of our immediate awareness of it, or our ability to fully comprehend it. A core question for realists is whether the universe is naturally self-generating and self-sustaining as atheistic defenders of naturalism claim, or whether it has an external source in the free act of a creator God who `wills that there be a reality other than himself, both for his own glory and for the sake of that world' as Jews, Christians, Muslims and others a¤rm (Gunton 2002: 18). Either way, reality is greater than I am and there is relatively little that I can do to change the way things are. Though it is certainly true that when I die the world changes, since I cease to

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be an integral part of it, nevertheless in the grand scheme of things my death changes little: the world goes on its course without me, my departure being a mere drop in the ocean for all but a few loved ones. Though critical realism is committed to a realistic understanding of the order-of-things, this does not require the acceptance of a materialistic philosophy that reduces accounts of mental activity to the level of physical causality. On the contrary, critical realism tends to reject any simplistic mind/body dualism in favour of a holistic reading of the world in which reality is made up of mind and matter existing in intimate and indivisible unity. Similarly realism need not imply, contra Descartes, that as observers of the world we are somehow distanced, dislocated and isolated from it. It follows from this that the primary epistemological task of critical realism is not to ¢nd ways of making contact with some external world, but rather to explore the objective reality that we are already intimately and inextricably engaged with. Because we indwell the world in a unity of mind and body our understanding of reality must inevitably proceed from our local `givenness' in time and space: our desire to comprehend the world proceeds from our recognition of the fact that we already inhabit a speci¢c location within the ultimate order-of-things. It follows that any description of reality we produce must include an account of our place within it: subjective experience needs to be brought into a synergetic and sympathetic relationship with objective reality. As Nagel puts it, if `one of the strongest philosophical motives is the desire for a comprehensive picture of objective reality', then `the natural place to begin is with our own position in the world' (Nagel 1986: 13). Critical realism thus seeks to piece together an account of reality in a form that does justice both to the whole and to its constituents parts, including myself, my subjective inner-space, and my developing physical, rational, moral, aesthetic and spiritual relationship with the ultimate order-of-things. If such an engagement with reality is to be in any sense authentic or truthful it must, of necessity, be a critical engagement. Critical realism sets its face against naive forms of realism which assume that reality can simply be read o¡ from surface appearances. There are, for example, enormous dangers in reducing reality to the sum of our empirical sense experiences, as the philosophical fundamentalism of the logical positivists encourages us to do. Even the most super¢cial level of critical re£ection shows the world to be altogether more complicated than this. For the critical realist authentic knowledge can be both trans-phenomenal and counter-phenomenal. Transphenomenalism claims that there is more to reality than mere surface appearance: we cannot taste either the hydrogen or oxygen in water, yet both are necessarily present in H2O. Knowledge may be not only of what appears, but of underlying structures, which endure longer than those appearances, and generate them or make them possible. We may have knowledge, not just of actions but

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of characters; not just of historical events but of social systems; not just of family likenesses but of the molecular structure of DNA. (Collier 1994: 6) Counter-phenomenalism argues not merely that reality has a deep structure underlying surface appearances, but that on occasions surface appearances may actually contradict the underlying reality. The fact that the setting sun can appear larger than the mid-day sun does not mean that the sun changes size, or that it has moved closer to the observer. Similarly, within a theological frame of reference, it is possible that human su¡ering may have a positive and creative role to play in the divine scheme of things, despite the apparent contradiction between the reality of evil and belief in the existence of an omnipotent and all-loving God. The fact that the world is not always as it appears drives our intellectual endeavours to comprehend reality; indeed, if the world could be understood on the basis of surface appearances then science would be a super£uous activity. It is precisely because our close scrutiny of the world consistently reveals far more than we initially anticipate that we ¢nd ourselves drawn to wrestle with it in an attempt to persuade it to yield up still more of its secrets. It is important to recognise that the basic truth claims a¤rmed by critical realism are minimal: that there is a reality existing independently of our ability to perceive or understand it; that our comprehension of the world must take account of our own subjective engagement with reality; and that the complexity of reality requires an appropriate level of critical thinking and self-criticism if we are to penetrate beneath surface appearances. It is signi¢cant that both versions of post-modernity we identi¢ed in the previous chapter may be read within the framework of critical realism with only minimal loss to their integrity. Thus Baudrillard's hyper-realism can be read as making the claim that the reality we indwell is inherently and essentially chaotic, while Levinas' concern for alterity and di¡erance can be read as making the claim that reality will ultimately always remain a mystery one step beyond our understanding.

The stratification of knowledge Critical realists are committed to the dialectic of the so-called `hermeneuticalcircle', which insists that the individual parts of reality must always be interpreted in the light of the whole, and the whole in the light of its constituent parts. Hence the modern university strives for universal knowledge by channelling the search for truth through a range of complementary faculties and subject disciplines. The academic task oscillates between the narrow focus of specialist areas of study and the broader focus of interdisciplinary exploration that attempts to engage with a variety of meta-narratives that

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seek to account for the ultimate order-of-things, whether these be religious or secular, realistic or idealistic, modern or post-modern. Our knowledge of reality is strati¢ed: the natural sciences (e.g. physics, chemistry, biology) leading into the human sciences (e.g. anthropology, sociology, psychology), leading into the arts (e.g. literature, music, aesthetics), leading into those meta-disciplines that seek to view the world as a whole (e.g. metaphysics, theology). Science, for example, is strati¢ed by a series of sub-disciplines such as biology, physics and chemistry, that are interrelated but not reducible to a single discipline. The fact that di¡erent universities organise and arrange these disciplines in di¡erent ways, and that such organisation is in a constant state of development and £ux, does not undermine the basic observation that we seek to understand the world through a strati¢ed hierarchy of academic disciplines. The fact that our knowledge is ¢ltered through these various academic disciplines suggests that reality itself is strati¢ed. Hence we need to draw on a whole range of academic disciplines if we are to begin to fully understand, say, Sir Simon Rattle conducting the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra in a cycle of Beethoven's symphonies: physics, sociology, psychology, history, mathematics, aesthetics, theology, etc. Each discipline will illuminate a speci¢c mechanism that contributes to the whole: the physicality of sound, the sociological make-up of the audience, the psychological impact of sound on the mind, the historical context of both performance and composer, the mathematical nature of musical notation, the aesthetic interpretation of Beethoven's compositions, and the spiritual impact and theological implications of his sound-world. The relationship between these various mechanisms is a complex one, since the reality under investigation is itself complex. Just as there can be no psychological response to music without the prior physicality of sound, so there can be no spiritual dimension to our listening without a prior psychological response. There are, then, basic priorities in the strati¢cation of knowledge: the natural sciences are more basic than the human sciences, which in turn are more basic than the arts. However, it is at this point that critical realism makes the crucial move of insisting that the strati¢cation of knowledge does not imply the reducibility of knowledge. The fact that our psychological response to music requires the prior reality of the physics of sound does not necessarily warrant the conclusion that we can reduce psychological explanations to physical ones. Similarly the fact that our spiritual response to music requires the prior reality of psychology does not justify the assumption that the spiritual dimension of our lives can be explained purely in psychological terms. Rather than spirituality being reduced to psychology, and psychology reduced to the product of a chain of physical causality, spiritual, psychological and physical explanations are all potentially valid, since the spiritual, the psychological and the physical are all simultaneously present in the one event.

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The signi¢cance of this is that it makes it di¤cult for any single academic discipline to claim privileged access to reality: given the fact that the universe remains one step beyond our ability to comprehend, it would appear to make sense to attend to a range of di¡erent interpretative disciplines, rather than prematurely privileging any one on the basis of, for example, the relative certainty of its claims to knowledge. As Collier notes, chemistry can't explain all the subtleties of human behaviour: `the written joke presupposes the chemical reality of inkmarks on paper, but it is not rooted in or emergent from them, in that they do not explain the joke' (Collier 1994: 115). This rules out atomism, `which claims that a reality is only understood when it is resolved into its smallest components' (116f ). It follows that the various academic disciplines are best seen as complementary to one another: to privilege one particular discipline, or cluster of disciplines, as having authority over all others is to limit our ability to comprehend the world. In attempting to make sense of Beethoven's symphonies I immediately restrict my understanding if I make the arbitrary decision to listen exclusively to either the physicist, the psychologist, the musicologist or the theologian. Musical performance is a rich and multifaceted a¡air, and if I am to penetrate below the surface appearance and engage with the deep structures and mechanisms of the musical event I must be open minded enough to draw on a range of interpretative disciplines, and learn to view them as complementary rather than as mutually exclusive. As Roy Bhaskar points out, the predicates `natural', `social', `human', `physical', `chemical', `aerodynamical', `biological', `economic', etc. ought not to be regarded as di¡erentiating distinct kinds of events, but as di¡erentiating distinct kinds of mechanisms. For in the generation of an open-systemic event several of these predicates may be simultaneously applicable. (Bhaskar 1997: 119)

Contingent rationality The previous section will undoubtedly have drawn murmurs of dissent from sceptical readers. Is not all this talk about the strati¢cation of knowledge, of complementary disciplines enabling us to establish an understanding of the ultimate nature of reality, simply repeating the totalitarian mistakes of modernity? Does not the notion of a dialectic of knowledge, in which the sum of academic disciplines is synthesised into a seamless whole, come dangerously close to mimicking the all-encompassing Hegelian System? And is not Hegel's claim to have unpacked, once and for all, the ultimate secrets of the universe the paradigmatic example of the excesses of modern thought (Kierkegaard 1968)? Is critical realism anything other than a late-modern attempt to secure our place in the universe by arbitrarily imposing its own

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preferred sense of order and meaning on the world? Is this not just one more misguided attempt to play god and create a universal meta-narrative? Such questions imply the necessity of making either/or choices when challenged to interpret and understand the universe. The suggestion that our knowledge is either absolutely objective or absolutely subjective has its roots in Descartes' insistence that authentic knowledge can be identi¢ed by the criteria of transparency, clarity and certainty, and that anything failing to match up to these standards must immediately be placed under the scrutiny of a hermeneutic of suspicion and consigned to the status of mere opinion. Post-modernity, in adopting the sceptical strategy of resisting the absolute and universal claims of modernity by a¤rming the fallibility of all truth claims, actually remains ¢rmly under the spell of Descartes. Thus radical post-modernists are absolutely certain that the attainment of knowledge is an impossible goal. The force of this either/or leaves little room for any mediating position between the extremes of absolute certainty and absolute scepticism; yet it is precisely in the middle ground that critical realism seeks to locate itself. For critical realists the fact that we can no longer play god and view the world sub specie aeternitatis but instead must learn the humility of engaging with reality sub specie humanitatis does not warrant the hard conclusion that we can have no legitimate knowledge of the order-of-things, merely the softer conclusion that such knowledge is necessarily limited, provisional and open to future revision. Indeed the recognition of the limits of the human mind is a prerequisite for that intellectual optimism which encourages us to push beyond our present knowledge towards a deeper and more authentic understanding of reality. As Nagel observes, although `we possess an open-ended capacity for understanding what we have not yet conceived . . . we must also admit that the world probably reaches beyond our capacity to understand it, no matter how far we travel' (Nagel 1986: 24). The account of the strati¢cation of knowledge presented by critical realism is, in a very real sense, no more than a pragmatic one. We make use of the academic disciplines available to us simply because, in however limited a fashion, they somehow appear to work. By immersing ourselves in the traditions, methods and insights of these disciplines we ¢nd that we are able to discover things about reality that we would not otherwise have known. The claim that we can begin to understand reality on the basis of that which we actually encounter in the world, rather than by weaving an imaginative hyper-realistic web of ¢ction, is not to be confused with the claim that our knowledge is secure, certain and ¢xed for all time. Just as Newtonian physics, predicated on the mathematics of absolute time and space, gave way to a paradigm shift in scienti¢c thinking driven by Einstein's theory of general relativity, so all academic disciplines are open to revision and development. The fact that physics now operates within a new interpretative paradigm does not require the conclusion that Newtonian science did not provide us

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with authentic insights into the nature of the physical world, only that we have now learnt newer and apparently better ways of penetrating deeper still into the mystery of physical reality. Similarly when the next scienti¢c paradigm marginalises or replaces our current models of scienti¢c thinking it is likely to complement and incorporate, rather than nullify, many of the insights achieved by contemporary scientists. The principles and methods underlying the various academic disciplines are not ¢xed and rigid; on the contrary, as the universe reveals its secrets so we modify our questions in the light of our developing understanding. This does not imply an evolutionary model of knowledge, in the sense that developments within a discipline will automatically constitute an intellectual advance on previous thinking. It is quite possible for disciplines to lose academic relevance, and even become redundant, and conversely for new disciplines to emerge. Further, the contingent nature of our critical engagement with reality is re£ected in the fact that it currently operates with a range of contrasting and con£icting meta-narratives: scientists, for example, though sharing a commitment to the rational basis of science, disagree as to whether the fruits of scienti¢c investigation point towards a naturalistic or theistic understanding of reality (McGrath 2001). Hence critical realism is best read as providing a philosophical re£ection on how best to respond to reality, rather than as a¤rming a closed meta-narrative. As we have already seen, because we indwell the world and cannot avoid adopting a stance within it, it follows that our understanding will always be rooted in a particular location in time and space. There is no neutral ground from which we can view reality dispassionately, without prior assumptions, beliefs and prejudices. As Gadamer puts it, there is necessarily a forestructure to all our understanding (Gadamer 1979). To claim that our understanding of ourselves and our place in the world proceeds from that which we already know is to claim that faith plays a vital and necessary part in our pursuit of knowledge. We make the best sense we can of the world, on the basis of our past and present experiences and relationships, using the best intellectual tools available to us, as we strive for still better ways of knowing and being in the world. The fact that knowledge necessarily proceeds from and through faith need not result in either subjectivism or relativism, since the academic disciplines o¡er us good reasons for making the kind of judgements which allow us to conclude that, on balance, this particular way of looking things is the most truthful way of describing the way things actually are in the world currently available to us. Hence our knowledge can be contingent without ceasing to be knowledge. Further, such contingent knowledge remains constantly open to new understanding, `for insofar as claims are being made, not about some supposedly infallible or incorrigible data of appearance, but about something that goes beyond them, the claims are always open to refutation by further information' (Collier 1994: 6).The task of making sense of the world proceeds from that which we already know,

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involving a disciplined penetration into, and interrogation of, reality guided by the contingent judgements of probability and warrant rather than proof and demonstration.

From knowledge to wisdom Any truthful and authentic engagement with the world requires the cultivation of a holistic wisdom. Our response to reality cannot be reduced to the crude rationalistic and empiricist modes of thought espoused by naturalism, the emotive self-expression praised by romanticism, or the creative free-play of the imagination celebrated by post-modernity. The historical roots of such wisdom can be traced back to classical Greek philosophy and the wisdom literature of the ancient near east. The turn to wisdom constitutes a recovery of the classical notion of paideia, the formative process of developing character and virtue via an immersion into a cultural heritage that requires us to take responsibility for our powers of reasoning, become critically aware and re£ective of our emotions and feelings, and thereby seek to relate ^ in thought, word and deed ^ truthfully to the way things actually are in the world (Jaeger 1965). There is no room here for the cherished modernist distinctions between theory and practice, sense and sensibility, objectivity and subjectivity. Wisdom constitutes `a complex cognitive stance that includes apprehension and appreciation as well as critical re£ection and an orientation to practice based on life experience' (Hodgson 1999: 7). Critical realism sets its face against the modern polarity between the Enlightenment's ideal of pure objective knowledge and the romantic/postmodern celebration of the vagaries of subjective opinion. T.S. Eliot referred to this dualism as the `dissociation of sensibility': the tearing apart of the realms of reason and emotion, fact and value, theory and practice, objectivity and subjectivity (Eliot 1999: 281¡ ). This dissociation of sensibility developed in parallel with the growth of the modern university system, which e¡ectively provided an institutional underpinning for the distinction between rei¢ed academic knowledge and the personal knowledge that £ows from the lifeworlds of shared assumptions and background convictions that shape ordinary everyday life (Habermas 1991: 70). The cultivation of wisdom is dependent on the collapsing of this distinction between sense and sensibility and the recovery of forms of knowledge that are simultaneously rational and personal. From a critical perspective it is clear that the post-modern commitment to the virtues of imagination and creativity fails to engage su¤ciently with the reasoning process; at the same time the modern commitment to rationality fails to appreciate the signi¢cance of the personal dimension of knowledge. Beyond the polarity of an unconstrained sensibility and a restrictive rationalism stands a synthesis of Wissenschaft and Glaube. Wissenschaft here refers not to a narrowly conceived application of scienti¢c method to the humanities,

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but more broadly to a striving after wisdom, understanding and truth on the basis of reasoned, ordered and disciplined thought, while Glaube indicates the personal faith and commitment that forms a necessary dimension of such striving. Hence understanding is not governed by any strict procedural rules, since this would reduce wisdom to the level of a serviceable technique and undermine its position as a foundational disposition driving our intellectual engagement with the world. The cultivation of wisdom is dependent on our acquiring the humility to learn from others. Despite the claims of many post-Enlightenment philosophers, both modern and post-modern, we cannot simply rely on our own experiences in attempting to understand reality since all we are likely to end up doing is projecting a make-believe world that conforms to our own needs and expectations. We are not isolated individuals forced into a solipsistic self-reliance in our search for truth, but relational creatures whose understanding is dependent on our ability to learn from the insights of others by immersing ourselves in tradition and culture. `Understanding is not to be thought of so much as an action of one's subjectivity, but as the placing of oneself within a process of tradition, in which past and present are constantly fused' (Gadamer 1979: 258). We learn to be scientists not by entering some neutral zone and beginning the scienti¢c enterprise from scratch, but by poring over the textbooks that will introduce us to the intellectual heritage of science (Kuhn 1962). Authentic freedom lies not in making arbitrary choices on the basis of personal preference, but in making wise and informed choices guided by the rich legacy of shared human wisdom. The humility of being willing to learn from those wiser than ourselves is not servility, but rather a `liberation from the tyranny of permissiveness, both personal and intellectual' (Derrick 2001: 46). Since our knowledge of the order-of-things is inseparable from the way we live out our lives, it follows that such knowledge is essentially personal in nature. According to Michael Polanyi, `into every act of knowing there enters a passionate contribution of the person knowing what is being known . . . [This] is no mere imperfection but a vital component of his knowledge' (Polanyi 1958: viif ). Though such personal knowledge is marked by a genuine engagement with the world, this still leaves room for the crucially important process of establishing a critical distance from the object under scrutiny. Stepping back from the world and allowing ourselves to become self-conscious of our relationship with it creates the time and space which are necessary if we are to develop measured and re£ective understanding and thereby avoid the danger of rushing into premature and uncritical judgements. By securing an engaged-yet-re£ective relationship with the world critical realists seek to mediate between a naive post-modern immersion in the world and a cynical modern disengagement from it. A hermeneutic of commitment is not incompatible with a hermeneutic of suspicion.

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The cultivation of wisdom also breaks down the modernist distinction between theory and practice. To gain knowledge is not to establish an abstract representation of reality in our minds, but rather to learn how to live wisely in the world. `How' we know cannot be separated from `what' we know: our knowledge scrutinises our actions, just as our actions interrogate our knowledge. According to Maxwell modes of enquiry devoted simply to the enhancement of factual knowledge must be `transformed into a kind of rational inquiry having as its basic aim to enhance personal and social wisdom' (Maxwell 1987: v). He goes on to suggest that `the basic task of rational inquiry is to help us develop wiser ways of living, wiser institutions, customs and social relations, a wiser world' (66). Steering a course between the extremes of modern rationalism and post-modern irrationalism, critical realism calls us to a wisdom that is attentive to experience, intelligent in understanding, reasonable in judgement, and responsible in decision making (Lonergan 1973: 231).

Evaluating post-modern philosophy The previous sections have set up critical realism as an alternative to both anti-realistic readings of post-modernity and narrowly conceived modernist modes of thought. Critical realism seeks to develop the legacy of the Enlightenment by challenging modernity's authoritarian leanings, whilst avoiding the post-modern tendency to undermine the importance of reason in our understanding of the world. The task of this ¢nal section is to draw conclusions about the nature and status of post-modern philosophy in the light of critical realism. One of the keynotes of our discussion so far has been the problem of nihilism as it relates to questions of human freedom, dignity and authenticity. At the heart of modernity stands the concern to empower human beings to become autonomous individuals willing and able to take full responsibility for their lives. This requires on the one hand an emancipation from authoritarian forms of religious superstition, and on the other the avoidance of a descent into an/archy in the wake of the departure of the God traditionally looked upon as the source of order and meaning in the world. The charge levelled by post-modern philosophers is that this modernist project has proved itself to be an abject failure, the struggle to avoid a nihilistic an/archy having led directly to the imposition of a nihilistic totalitarianism driven by the archic meta-narratives of modernity. How are we to evaluate this charge in the light of our discussion of critical realism? The ¢rst thing to say is that there is certainly an element of truth in the post-modern claim: modernity can be interpreted as giving support to a range of totalitarian meta-narratives and having presided over some of the worst atrocities in the history of the human race. Yet this is not the whole story, since amongst the major achievements of modernity has been the

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establishment of a system of liberal democracy that, by insisting on the virtues of freedom and tolerance and acknowledging the limits and fallibility of human understanding, has played a crucial role in opposing the spread of totalitarian regimes. We draw simplistic either/or conclusions about the legacy of the Enlightenment at our peril. Baudrillard's anti-realistic reading of modernity is, at best, highly selective. To claim that we can know nothing about an actual order-of-things hidden behind the hyper-reality created by the whirligig of post-modern culture is clearly to claim too much. Baudrillard's scepticism cannot possibly be taken literally; at best it must be read as shrouded in a cloak of irony. Even the most dedicated anti-realist philosopher, crossing the Atlantic Ocean to deliver an eagerly-awaited intellectual demolition of realism, will be forced to concede that the airplane boarded to reach that destination £ies ^ and it £ies, at least in part, on account of the relation between pressure and kinetic energy ¢rst set out by Daniel Bernouilli in 1738. (McGrath 2001: 72) Sooner or later our intellectual spade is turned and we arrive at some philosophical bed-rock: we either elect to play the anti-realistic game of creating our preferred ¢ctional realities, or we look for alternatives. Antirealism puts forward positive claims about the nature of reality, in particular that it is in a state of constant disorderly £ux. Since the wisdom a¤rmed by critical realism is not generally shared by defenders of hyper-realism, there may well be no way of resolving the dispute between them on the basis of reasoned argument. Hence the stance advocated here is in a very real sense a leap of faith, though no more so than the leap demanded by Baudrillard. We either choose re£ective wisdom or we choose post-modern sophistry. The judgement call made here is that on balance critical realism has more to o¡er than hyper-realism, and consequently we should respect those willing to engage in the task of wrestling with the world in order to encourage it to yield still more of its secrets. It is di¤cult to avoid the impression that something is not quite right with Baudrillard's rhetoric. The dogmatism of antirealism, a dogmatism that runs against the grain of common sense and the ordinary life-experiences of human beings regardless of cultural boundaries, seems to embody exactly the same totalitarian tendencies Baudrillard accuses modernity of embracing. Where Baudrillard claims to have the intellectual game sewn up, critical realism is happy to acknowledge the limits of our humanity. The cause of human freedom, dignity and integrity is, on balance, probably better served by critical realism than it is by an anti-realistic hyperrealism. The position adopted by Derrida, Levinas and other advocates of postmodern alterity is of an altogether di¡erent order. Here the dogmatic

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certainty that the only reality is that which we create for ourselves is replaced with a thoroughgoing openness to the horizon of the Other. The claim that we must be humble in our judgements, and actively resist any premature closure of understanding, is worlds apart from Baudrillard's sophistry. The very real danger here, however, is of this commitment to alterity transforming itself into yet another closed meta-narrative grounded in a thoroughgoing and systematic agnosticism. The commitment to listen to the voice of the Other need not obscure that which is already known, and does not require the suspension of the faculty of reason. Intelligence and receptivity are complementary, not mutually exclusive, virtues. The supposition that we make contact with reality when performing open heart surgery constitutes a relatively uncontroversial truth claim that is not intrinsically authoritarian, and which need not undermine the concerns of those wishing to attend to voices of di¡erence and otherness. To assert the objective truth of the current state of cardiology is not to claim that we have come anywhere near a full understanding of the way the heart functions, or to suggest that future research will not require us to abandon our current paradigm of medical science, or to deny the value of alternative forms of medicine. It is, however, to claim that we have relatively clear and certain knowledge of at least some aspects of the way the heart functions, together with an understanding of how, in certain cases, we can successfully repair a malfunctioning heart. Provided post-modern alterity avoids claiming anything more than an ability to keep the horizons of understanding open, it would appear to have a positive role to play in partnership with critical realism. The ongoing struggle to engage critically with reality needs constantly reminding both of the limits of human understanding, and of the importance of remaining receptive to that which lies beyond established horizons of meaning. Critical realism, in partnership with alteristic forms of post-modernity, suggests a way of progressing towards deeper and more truthful knowledge of ourselves, and of our place in the ultimate order-of-things, however provisional, limited and contingent such knowledge might be. We have seen, then, that the philosophy of critical realism, insofar as it a¤rms both the reality of our knowledge of the world and its inevitable provisonality, steers a course between the modern tendency to drift towards an archic nihilism and the post-modern tendency to embrace an an/archic nihilism. Critical realism constitutes a viable option insofar as it avoids the extremes of claiming either that we possess absolute knowledge of the ultimate order-of-things, or that there is no possibility of obtaining anything even vaguely resembling knowledge. Despite its popularity in some quarters, anti-realism appears to be self-contradictory in proclaiming the truth that there is no such thing as truth. Post-modern alterity on the other hand, insofar as it is able to avoid the danger of slipping into a closed dogmatic agnosticism, promises to enhance and enrich the philosophy of critical realism by

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ensuring that our horizons of meaning remain £exible. Hence, in exploring the interface between religion, theology and education in the rest of this book, we will assume the general viability of a critical realism enhanced by a non-dogmatic post-modern commitment to alterity, and tread with considerable caution around the quasi-totalitarian claims of post-modern antirealism.

Part II

Theology

Chapter 6

Deconstructing modern theology

Opinion is sharply divided over the nature and signi¢cance of the impact of post-modernity on religion. For some observers `the contributions currently being made by many theologians to the changing orientation of postmodern thought appear to herald the end of theology's long intellectual marginalization' (Berry 1992: 4). Others are more circumspect, cautioning that where `modernism tried to elevate man into God's place, postmodern theory seeks to destroy or deconstruct the very place and attributes of God' (Ingra¤a 1995: 1). It is clear from the outset that our discussion of the interface of theology and post-modernity must be attentive to the nuances of a complex situation. We begin by focusing on attempts to assimilate theology within a modernist framework, suggesting that post-modern critiques have got matters about right: modern theology has become inextricably bound up with a set of power-structures that serve primarily to maintain the security of modernity itself. Driven by a desire to support distinctively modern notions of human integrity and £ourishing, modernity e¡ectively domesticates God by invoking the divine in support of the modernist project.

The domestication of God Central to the agenda of modern theology is the age-old question of the relationship between God and humanity. According to Plato our distance from God is one simply of degree, since we retain something of the spark of divinity in our innermost being. The Judaeo-Christian tradition sees things very di¡erently, a¤rming an in¢nite qualitative distinction between God and creation. The resulting tension between divine holiness and human sinfulness is an issue of fundamental concern for Christian theology, which has been consistent in a¤rming that we cannot earn our way to salvation, since all our good work counts for nothing in the face of God's gracious acceptance of us despite our fallen nature. Augustine's doctrine of original sin is clearly out of place in a modern world keen to celebrate the basic goodness of humanity. The danger, from a modernist perspective, is that the Christian understanding of grace threatens to undermine our freedom, compromise

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our dignity, and deny our capacity for rational thought by forcing us into a blind and ultimately humiliating leap of faith. Medieval theology had relatively little di¤culty in countering this danger by a¤rming an intimate God-given connection between divine grace and human reason. God, in creating an ordered universe and revealing himself as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, gifted the world a divine meta-narrative that Christians learnt to celebrate in worship, recite in the creeds, and subject to scholarly investigation. Since God was revealed precisely through this mysterious economy of salvation, theologians were able to establish a balance between `awe in the face of divine mystery and boldness in envisioning the possibilities of grace' (Placher 1996: 6). If the greatest of all medieval theologians, Thomas Aquinas, insisted that we possess secure theological knowledge, he also recognised that such positive theology must be supplemented by a negative theology in which `divinity is readily conceived of as thoroughly inconceivable' (Davies 1993: 42). Medieval scholasticism thus synthesised faith and knowledge into a seamless whole. The theological task of faith seeking understanding, of the human intellect responding intelligently to the divine gift of revelation, succeeded `in connecting theological and scienti¢c concepts in such a way that theology and science shared together in the developing understanding of a rationally ordered universe' (Torrance 1980: 22). By the start of the modern era such con¢dence in the unity of faith and reason had all but disintegrated. As was noted earlier, a major source of this collapse is to be found in the theology of William of Ockham. Convinced that the medieval balance between the absolute mystery of God and the freedom of human beings to think rationally about divine reality had shifted decisively in favour of the latter, Ockham claimed that this threatened to undermine the sovereignty, freedom and omnipotence of God by placing the creator under the authority of human reason. One result of Ockham's stress on the absolute mystery of God was that the personal trinitarian God of Christian orthodoxy who ^ through the incarnation of the Son and the creative and illuminating work of the Holy Spirit ^ was believed to be intimately involved with his creation in a loving and gracious manner, was replaced with an abstract and utterly transcendent deity. Radically separated from his creation, and possessing a wisdom that transcends human comprehension, this divine being was deemed absolutely free to behave in what appeared to be ^ at least in human terms ^ an entirely arbitrary manner. This meant that human beings could no longer hope to properly understand either God or his creation, and as a consequence the unity of faith and knowledge was eclipsed by a blind leap into the unknown. Ockham's theology led him to posit an apparently contingent world in which we are unable to discern any inherent order, meaning or purpose. `For Ockham the idea of divine omnipotence thus means that human beings can never be certain that any of the impressions they have correspond to an actual object'

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(Gillespie 1996: 18). Ockham's nominalism, which assumed that language could no longer represent the order-of-things, clearly anticipated key aspects of post-modern thought. The Protestant reformer John Calvin followed Ockham in seeking to free God from any hint of human authority or control. In doing so he was driven by ¢delity to the trinitarian God revealed in Christian scripture, and by a concern to preserve a qualitative distinction between God and fallen humanity. If the sovereignty of God makes it impossible for us to justify ourselves before our creator, the love of God invites us to embrace, in joyful freedom, the divine gift of grace. Despite the fact that the created world proclaims God's glory, our minds are so distorted by sin that we are dependent on divine revelation for knowledge of the triune God, creator, sustainer and redeemer of the universe. Through the incarnation and sacri¢cial death of Jesus Christ we are divinely elected as children of God. This eternal election is entirely the free gift of God, who has predestined some to eternal salvation and others to eternal damnation. The fact that `salvation is freely o¡ered to some while others are barred from access to it' is, as Calvin is quick to admit, a ba¥ing doctrine for Christians to accept (Calvin 1960: 921). He recognises that there are those who, approaching the doctrine from a purely human point of view, `can think nothing more inconsistent than that out of the common multitude of men some should be predestined to salvation, others to destruction' (921). Nevertheless he sticks ¢rmly to his guns on this matter. Who are we to question the unfathomable will of God? If ^ to make it clear that our salvation comes about solely from God's mere generosity ^ we must be called back to the course of election, those who wish to get rid of all this are obscuring as maliciously as they can what ought to have been gloriously and vociferously proclaimed, and they tear humility up by the very roots. (921) What for Calvin is a stubborn refusal to humbly submit to the inconceivable will of God is for modern theology a glorious assertion of the freedom, dignity and responsibility of human beings. Hence the project of modern theology is rooted in the need to preserve the freedom and integrity of human beings before God, called as they are by Descartes and Kant to start from their own experience and to have the courage to trust their own reason. According to Calvin, without `knowledge of self there is no knowledge of God', and `without knowledge of God there is no knowledge of self ' (35¡ ). For orthodox Christians knowledge of God is a necessary prerequisite of authentic self-knowledge. Hence Augustine's prayerful observation that the thought of God stirs us `so deeply that [we] cannot be content unless [we praise] you, because you made us for yourself and our hearts ¢nd no peace until they rest in you' (Augustine 1961: 21). Modern theology, in sharp

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contrast, is predicated on the need to reverse this order of priority, ¢rst establishing human dignity and freedom and only then turning to God. Hence for Paul Tillich religious questions begin as human questions, since at the heart of the human condition lies a concern for our ultimate destiny, for that which determines our being or non-being (Tillich 1978: 14). If the proper `object of theology is what concerns us ultimately', then the task of theology is to bring us into relationship with the question of being, with the question of the ultimate mystery of the universe, by correlating our thoughts and experiences with transcendent reality (12). In beginning theology `from below' and insisting that we look to understand ourselves before attempting to understand God, rather than doing theology `from above' by starting from God's revelation to us, Tillich a¤rms the basic principle at the heart of the project of modern theology: `understanding seeking faith' takes precedence over `faith seeking understanding'. Human beings must free themselves from the clutches of any arbitrary deity. Gloucester's observation in Shakespeare's King Lear that `As £ies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; / They kill us for their sport' is no longer an acceptable basis for theology in the modern world: in the name of human dignity such gods must be domesticated and called to account (Act 4, Scene 1) .

Naturalism and the God of the philosophers Naturalism, as we have seen, constitutes one of the core meta-narratives of modernity. The majority of Enlightenment philosophers viewed the natural world, open as it was to rational scrutiny and empirical investigation, as the ground and foundation of our knowledge of reality. The epistemological certainty demanded by Descartes was established by demonstrating the convergence between the physical world `out there' and the picture of that world gradually being built up in the mind of the scientist. This inevitably raised the fundamental question of the source of the being and order of the universe. The response that was eventually given by atheism was simply to posit the natural world as self-generating and self-sustaining. However, the opening phase of the Enlightenment was committed to forms of Aristotelian logic that medieval scholasticism had previously integrated successfully with Christian theology, and according to such logic the notion of a self-creating and self-sustaining reality was reserved exclusively for God. This assumption is clearly visible in Aquinas' distinctively Aristotelian argument that `whatever is in motion must be put in motion by another . . . [but since] this cannot go on to in¢nity . . . it is necessary to arrive at a ¢rst mover, put in motion by no other; and this everyone understands to be God' (Aquinas 1920: 25). Underlying this chain of reasoning lies one of the core concepts of classical Greek philosophy: arche, the basic rational principle of the universe, the ultimate source and structure of the order-of-things

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(Gerson 1994: 5¡ ). Without an established principle of arche the natural world is in danger of descending into chaos and anarchy, the very danger the Enlightenment was striving to avoid. Those philosophers unable to embrace a thoroughgoing atheism were faced with the dilemma of identifying the natural world as the core of reality, yet being unable to explain how it came into being, or why it remains open to rational investigation. Hence it became necessary to invoke God as the foundational principle upon which the existence and order of the natural world depends. It was this particular understanding of God that provided the foundations for the deistic tradition that £ourished in the early stages of the Enlightenment in the writings of, amongst others, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, Matthew Tindal and John Locke in England, and Voltaire, Lessing and Kant on the Continent. At the heart of deism was a commitment to a common universal religion accessible to all through rational re£ection. In De Veritate Herbert of Cherbury argues for the existence of a sovereign deity on the basis of the evidence provided by the order of the natural world and the moral law imprinted on human hearts (Smart (ed.) 1962: 85¡ ). John Locke's discussion of the relationship between faith and reason in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, though respecting the truth of Christian revelation, nevertheless insisted that such revelation must be subject to the judgement of reason (Locke 1975: 688¡ ). Hence it comes as no surprise to discover that Locke's apologetic defence of religion was grounded in his belief in the reasonableness of Christianity (Locke 1958). For the deists, reason is `a gift from God and is therefore our ¢nal arbiter, and even faith must be in conformity with it' (Byrne 1996: 107). Deism adopted a negative attitude towards the Christian concept of revelation, holding that religion is a universal phenomenon accessible to all on the basis of natural reason, and as such is not dependent on any exclusive historical revelation available only to a select few. Advocates of deism were particularly averse to the biblical accounts of miracle, believing them to be incompatible with a universe governed by the immutable laws of nature. John Toland's Christianity not Mysterious insisted that the miraculous and supernatural aspects of Christianity could be safely discarded because true religion must conform to the rational laws of nature (Toland 1978). The impact of deism on the Church of England is most clearly visibly in the latitudinarianism of the Cambridge Platonists, whose distinctly laissez-faire attitude to issues of doctrinal truth, liturgical practice and church organisation anticipated the emergence of liberal theology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As Byrne points out, such a restriction of belief to that which is accessible to the enquiring human mind resulted in a religion in which God is seen not as the biblical Father but as the Supreme Being, the impersonal Creator, a God who is a necessary requirement for the maintenance of the laws of nature but

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is little interested in worship, doctrine, churches and other religious trappings. (Byrne 1996: 100) Deism provided the meta-narrative of naturalism with a theological grounding in a number of ways. First by constructing a deity whose primary function is to act as the ¢rst principle of order in the universe. Secondly by freeing humanity from the authority of the supposedly arbitrary God of Calvin and Ockham. Thirdly by reinforcing the Enlightenment's commitment to the sovereignty of reason by replacing a revealed theology grounded in faith with a natural theology grounded in reason. In e¡ect the deists domesticated the Judaeo-Christian God in order to secure their own naturalistic vision of reality. As we have already seen, the central charge levelled against naturalism by post-modern philosophy is that it misguidedly sought to establish a secure place for humanity within the natural order-of-things. To the extent that deism, as a distinctively modern theology, is committed to the meta-narrative of naturalism, so it is also vulnerable to post-modern attacks on that meta-narrative.

Romanticism and religious experience In the famous Memorial, found sewn into the lining of his coat after his death, Pascal distinguished between the personal `God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob' and an abstract God of `philosophers and scholars', whose role was to provide the ¢rst principle of order in the universe rather than act as saviour and redeemer of the world (Kung 1980: 57). The Memorial opens with a single capitalised word: `FIRE'. The reference is to Moses' encounter with God at the Burning Bush, and the intention is clearly to act as a reminder of the central importance for faith of religious experience (Exodus 3:1¡ ). In the Pense¨es Pascal o¡ers a direct criticism of `those who are accustomed to reason from principles' yet `have no understanding of matters involving feeling' (Pascal 1966: 257). The genuinely religious person is concerned with encountering God face-to-face, with a life of spirituality, devotion and worship, rather than academic philosophy and theology. As William Law observed in 1728, writing, at least in part, in opposition to deism: He therefore is the devout man who lives no longer to his own will, or the way and spirit of the world, but to the sole will of God, who considers God in everything, who serves God in everything, who makes all the parts of his common life parts of piety by doing everything in the name of God and under such rules as are conformable to His glory. (Law 1978: 47)

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Law was an important ¢gure in a widespread Protestant response to the Enlightenment that embraced German pietism, especially in the thought of Philipp Spener and August Francke, the Puritan revival in Britain, exempli¢ed in the growth of Methodism and evangelicalism, and the so-called `Great Awakening' in the United States, lead by Jonathan Edwards and George Whit¢eld ( Jones et al. (eds) 1986: 437¡ ). Seeking to move beyond philosophical deism and both Catholic and Protestant scholasticism, the movement focused on the central importance of experiencing at ¢rst hand the power of the Christian gospel through religious rebirth and conversion, prayer and spirituality, inward piety and devotion. Though such Protestant devotion signalled a rejection of the Enlightenment, it nevertheless had a deep impact on modern theology, e¡ectively laying the foundations for a recasting of religious thought within the framework of romanticism. The philosophical roots of romantic theology are to be found in Kant's distinction between pure and practical reason (Kant 1999a, 1999b). His approach to pure reason begins by distinguishing between the noumenal world in-itself and the phenomenal world of appearances. We have no direct access to the noumenal world, and our understanding of the phenomenal world is limited by certain categories of understanding through which the mind is predisposed to engage with reality, in particular the categories of space and time. Since God transcends both time and space, our knowledge of divine reality is unobtainable through phenomenological investigation grounded in pure reason. Kant concludes from this that our only access to knowledge of God is through practical reason, on the basis of questions about what I ought to do, rather than what I can know. The summum bonum of the Kantian ethical system is the principle that `I ought never to act except in such a way that I could also will that my maxim should become a universal law' (Kant 1998: 15). This categorical imperative urges us to act in such a way `that you use humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means' (38). If the moral order is to be sustained it is necessary that virtue be granted its just reward, and since this clearly is not always achieved in this world Kant is drawn to assert a belief in immortality. This leads him to a¤rm God as the guarantor of moral order, since `only God could be the cause which puts into e¡ect the proportion of happiness to virtue required by the concept of the highest good' (Byrne 1996: 221, cf. Kant 1960). Both the moral law and the reality of God are written on our hearts, and our knowledge of them is gained not through a chain of logic but through an immediate introspective apprehension. Romanticism, as we saw earlier, was driven by a concern to rehabilitate the language of morality, ethics and religion on the basis of our inner experience. Kant's turn inwards, to the contemplation of our spiritual `inner space', provides the philosophical grounding for the romantic belief that `modern man has to learn to be autonomous ^ to see

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that the needs of faith, like the imperative of duty, are in essence the ful¢lment of his own nature' (Reardon 1966: 2). It was the German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher who did most to pioneer the recasting of religion with the framework of romanticism. He learnt the central importance of religious experience from his pietistic upbringing amongst the Moravian Brethren, and the signi¢cance of the immediacy of moral, aesthetic and spiritual experience directly from Kant. In his ground-breaking On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers he argues that the roots of authentic religion lie not in rational argument but in the experience of a transcendent or divine reality: the `contemplation of the pious is the immediate consciousness of the universal existence of all ¢nite things, in and through the In¢nite, and of all temporal things in and through the Eternal' (Schleiermacher 1958: 36). In The Christian Faith, his celebrated systematic theology, Schleiermacher represents the religious life as `neither a Knowing or a Doing, but a modi¢cation of Feeling, or of immediate self-consciousness' (Schleiermacher 1976: 5). Though he had no desire to keep academics from passing judgement on Christian truth claims, or to deny politicians the right to critique Christian ethical practice, he believed that the primary concern of Christian theologians must focus on the experience of God that precedes all such knowledge and action. Since religion `resigns, at once, all claims on anything that belongs either to science or morality' the concern of the theologian is simply to investigate the religious experience of Christians (Schleiermacher 1958: 35). Authentic spirituality ^ Schleiermacher's preferred term was `piety' ^ is grounded in the individual's experience of God rather than in a misplaced `craving for a mess of metaphysical and ethical crumbs' (31). The essence of religion is `the consciousness of being absolutely dependent, or, which is the same thing, of being in relation with God' (Schleiermacher 1976: 12). It follows that `Christian doctrines are accounts of the Christian religious a¡ections set forth in speech' and as such, though they have some limited scienti¢c value as descriptors of reality, their primary role is to recall the Christian community to the primal experience of God that constitutes the source and bed-rock of faith (76). As Paul Avis puts it: Schleiermacher accepts the thesis of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason . . . that reason cannot attain to the knowledge of ultimate reality (noumena), but he did not believe that this need put a stop to talk of God in theology ^ not because `revelation' had come to the rescue with a body of readymade truths, but because at the deepest level of his being, in feeling or immediate consciousness, man is the subject of an original, pretheoretical awareness of reality. (Avis 1986: 8)

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Romanticism locates the heart of reality in our deepest and most profound inner experiences. Schleiermacher's genius, as the acknowledged founder of modern theology, was to equate this depth of human experience with our experience of God. Where the naturalistic meta-narrative reduced religion to the ¢rst principle of order in the universe, so Schleiermacher's appropriation of religion within the framework of romanticism discovered God in the immediacy of human experience, and in doing so located religion at the very heart of modernity. As Lindbeck points out, the romanticising of theology brought about a fundamental shift in the modern understanding of the nature and function of religious language (Lindbeck 1984). Where previously classical theology operated with a `cognitive^propositional' understanding of religious language, in which doctrinal statements o¡ered descriptive truth claims about the ultimate nature of reality, now romantic theology gave birth to an `experiential^expressive' model of religious language in which religious doctrines were viewed as expressive symbols of inner feelings and sentiments. In the post-Kantian world the theologian could no longer speak directly of God, only indirectly of the human experience of God. The major problem for romantic forms of theology was how to distinguish between subjective experience of the inner self and objective experience of a transcendent God. The apparent impossibility of resolving this dilemma formed the heart of Feuerbach's rejection of religion as simply a projection of the highest feelings and aspirations of humanity. Religion, insofar as it remains unable or unwilling to distinguish between human and transcendent experience, constitutes a `childlike condition of humanity' (Feuerbach 1957: 13). As civilisation comes of age so it learns that `what by an earlier religion is regarded as objective, is now recognised as subjective; that is, what was formerly contemplated and worshipped as God is now perceived as something human' (13). Feuerbach's critique received support from the Reformed theologian Karl Barth, who objected to the rooting of religious faith in human experience on the grounds that such a move compromises the sovereignty of God. In his celebrated commentary on Paul's Epistle to the Romans he argues that since a divinity that needs the support from human beings cannot possibly be God, it follows that `the power of God can be detected neither in the world of nature nor in the souls of men' (Barth 1968: 36). As Stanley Hauerwas observes, `Barth staged a frontal attack on some of the most cherished conceits of modernity, not the least being the conceit that humans are the measure of all that is' (Hauerwas 2002: 145). To identify human experience as experience of God is ultimately to do no more than employ theological language to authenticate romanticism, in precisely the same way that the deists invoked God as the ¢rst principle of order in the universe in order to underpin naturalism. If the focal point of reality is human experience, and if such experience is indistinguishable from transcendent experience, then the meta-narrative of romanticism receives the ultimate

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seal of approval in the form of divine sanction. In e¡ect `God' is domesticated as a means of legitimating the dogmas of romanticism.

Liberalism and universal theology The ¢nal stage in the argument that modernity domesticates God by utilising theology in order to secure its own legitimation focuses on the third of our modern meta-narratives: liberalism. As we have already seen, the liberal commitment to freedom of belief and tolerance of the beliefs of others was initially conceived by John Locke as an interim ethic designed to enable the ongoing and increasingly controversial search for truth to proceed in a spirit of mutual respect and good-will. However, it quickly developed into a closed meta-narrative whose primary function was to establish and police a nonnegotiable world-view in which beliefs were considered valid only insofar as they demonstrated their basic tolerance of the beliefs of others by embracing relativism and refusing to claim any universal validity. This closed liberal order is incompatible with most orthodox forms of religion. Judaism, Christianity and Islam, for example, all lay claim to the possession of exclusive, universal and hence mutually incompatible theological truths. If Jesus of Nazareth is no more than a misguided Jewish teacher then he cannot also be the incarnate God of the Christian creeds, nor the prophet of Allah proclaimed by Islam. Liberalism's fundamental distinction between objective knowledge and subjective belief reduces the incompatible truth claims propounded by western monotheism to the status of mere private opinion. It follows that all those who elect to present such opinions as secure knowledge, and on that basis seek to proselytise their beliefs, are guilty of promulgating intolerant regimes that must, in the name of tolerance, be actively resisted. By claiming access to knowledge that warrants only the status of belief, and by insisting on the exclusivity and universality of such knowledge, orthodox forms of religion directly challenge the moral order of liberalism. Perhaps the most in£uential response to the challenge of religious exclusivism takes the form of an appropriation of theology within the world-view of liberalism itself, a strategy best exempli¢ed by the work of John Hick. In God and the Universe of Faiths he called for a `copernican revolution' in which the Christo-centric and ecclesio-centric perspectives that have dominated Christian theology through the ages would be replaced by a new theocentricism (Hick 1977). His fellow Christians, he argued, must accept a `shift from the dogma that Christianity is at the centre to the realisation that it is God who is at the centre, and that all the religions of mankind, including our own, serve and revolve around him' (131). In An Interpretation of Religion Hick presents his argument in a systematic form (Hick 1989). He begins by asserting that the universe is fundamentally ambiguous, open to both naturalistic and religious interpretations. Our

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response to this situation takes the form of experiencing the world `as if ' it is either self-explanatory or requires some transcendent source to account for its being. `The religious awareness of the world and of our life within it ranges from, for example, the experiencing by the ancient Hebrew prophets of historical events as divine acts to the Mahayana Buddhist experience of Samsara, the £eeting round of birth, death and su¡ering, as Nirvana' (13). The choice between naturalism and religion constitutes an ongoing decision of faith about the basic `facts' of the universe. Both sides run the risk of being ultimately mistaken: if religion is true then naturalism is untrue, and vice versa. The choice we make will be subject to eschatological con¢rmation or discon¢rmation; when we die we will either encounter an after-life, or we will not. Confronted with this choice it is rationally appropriate for those who experience their life in relation to the transcendent to trust their own experience, together with that of the stream of religious life in which they participate and of the great ¢gures who are its primary experiential witnesses, and to proceed to believe and to live on that basis. (13) Hick thus reveals himself as a thoroughgoing realist, one who views postmodern non-realism as ultimately a form of naturalism. This opens up the problem of religious pluralism, that `di¡erent forms of religious experience justify di¡erent and often incompatible sets of beliefs' (13). At this point in his argument Hick invokes the Kantian distinction between the way things actually are in reality, and the way things appear to us as, ¢ltered through our perceptual and intellectual apparatus. Since it is both rational and reasonable for us to trust our immediate religious experiences, and since such experience is merely human experience, this `suggests the hypothesis that the in¢nite Real, in itself beyond the scope of other than purely formal concepts, is di¡erently conceived, experienced and responded to from within the di¡erent cultural ways of being human' (14). In e¡ect Hick is invoking Schleiermacher's experiential^expressive model of religion: a common universal religious experience is given diverse and culturally variable expressions. Thus transcendence, the `in¢nite Real', is expressed in monotheistic religion as `deity' (Yahweh, the heavenly Father, Allah, Vishnu, Shiva) and in non-theistic traditions as the `absolute' (Brahman, the Tao, the Dharmakaya, Sunyata). Human beings orient themselves towards this transcendent reality in a variety of forms of prayer, worship and/or meditation, thereby seeking salvation, liberation and a transformation from `selfcentredness' to `reality-centredness'. Hick's criteria for evaluating religion as a whole, together with the manifestations of speci¢c religious traditions in particular, is soteriological: a religion has the mark of truth and authenticity insofar as it functions to nurture

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the common ethical ideal of compassionate love and, in so doing, progressively shifts individual traditions from `self-centredness' towards `realitycentredness'. The contradictory historical beliefs of the world's religions, though in part open to historical examination, are generally to be tolerated as culturally relative variables. The contradictory trans-historical doctrinal beliefs concerning the nature of the ultimate cannot be answered, and indeed need not be answered, since they have little salvi¢c signi¢cance. The di¡erent ways we have of thinking and experiencing the ultimate `represent di¡erent phenomenal awarenesses of the same noumenal reality and evoke parallel salvi¢c transformations of human life' (15). How are we to evaluate Hick's project? It is clear that many of his key assumptions are drawn directly from a romantic reading of religion: Protestant pietism's commitment to the centrality of religious experience, Kant's insistence that we only ever experience the world as it appears to us, Schleiermacher's experiential^expressive model of religion. He goes beyond romanticism by introducing the liberal values of freedom and tolerance, predicated on the relativity of all beliefs, into the theological equation. We can never know ultimate reality directly, and consequently our religious knowledge is always marked by the contingencies of history and the variables of culture. What really matters, therefore, is not whether our beliefs are true, but whether we hold them in a spirit of openness and tolerance: religion is authentic when, and only when, it comes to the aid of the value system of modern liberalism; religion is legitimate when, and only when, it produces the moral fruits of compassionate love celebrated by liberals. The fact that Hick's liberal theology is embraced by many liberals as the only viable theology for a liberal age is a con¢rmation of the basic argument of this section: liberal theology e¡ectively domesticates classical theology by taking it up and reinterpreting it so that it can function as a buttress of the moral order of modern liberalism. The basic problem with Hick's theology, as Gavin D'Costa points out, is that his journey from a conservative exclusivist Christianity to a universal theology is a journey not into a new era of interreligious ecumenism, but into a regime of liberal intolerance (D'Costa 2000). Hick makes a string of assumptions about Christianity that are simply anathema to mainstream Roman Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox Christians: that the incarnation is merely a myth, that `God' is a generic concept rather than a trinitarian reality, that Christian theological discourse has no cognitive substance, that the legitimation of Christianity rests with its moral utility rather than its realistic truth. In e¡ect the core beliefs of Christianity, as well as those of Judaism, Islam and indeed all the great world faiths, are ¢ltered through a liberal interpretative framework. `Hick's ``pluralism'' masks the advocation of liberal modernity's ``god,'' in this case a form of ethical agnosticism' (26). This agnosticism mysti¢es rather than illuminates the brute fact of con£ict in religion: by pushing religious di¡erence under the carpet and insisting

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instead that everybody becomes an ethical agnostic Hick ultimately fails to tackle the problem of religious pluralism, appearing content `to ignore or deny the really di¤cult con£icting truth claims by, in e¡ect, reducing them to sameness' (27). The simple fact is that ¢rmly held and con£icting beliefs that make di¡ering claims about reality are part and parcel of our social, cultural and political reality. Hick, D'Costa suggests, is so captivated by a particular western bourgeois mythology that he is unable to imagine, recognise or respect the Other. At the end of the day his liberalism insists that all religious people should view their religion in the way he does. This is tantamount to a religious imperialism in which `every form of religion is catalogued and encoded into modernity's narrative of time, space and history' (28). Though he does not say it directly, the logic of D'Costa's critique is that if the liberal values of freedom and tolerance are to be e¡ective in securing a new world-order then liberalism operating as a closed world-view concerned to proselytise its distinctive meta-narrative must give way to liberalism functioning as an interim ethic concerned to facilitate conversation across con£icting religious and secular traditions in a spirit of openness to alterity, di¡erence and the voice of the Other. In the absence of such a move the basic criticism of liberal theology made here remains ¢rmly in place: liberals domesticate God by invoking him as the source of the core principles of freedom and tolerance upon which the liberal order depends. This chapter has focused attention on the various ways in which modernity has assimilated the theological heritage of the western world. Jeremy Ahearne draws attention to Michel Certeau's belief that often the `interpretative models through which the interpreter organises and comprehends the traces of the past are themselves shown to be the products of a particular history, which must itself be analysed' (Ahearne 1995: 39). Our discussion sought to analyse the impact of modernity's self-understanding on its reading of its theological past. We suggested that the desire to possess secure knowledge of ultimate reality ^ knowledge traditionally the exclusive possession of God ^ caused modernity to sideline the self-understanding of classical theology by assimilating it within its own chosen frame of reference. On the assumption that `we must accept our lot, bequeathed to us by the Enlightenment, and make the most of it', modernity e¡ectively domesticated classical theology, drawing on it to legitimate its own foundational meta-narratives (Houlden 1977: 125). Riding roughshod over classical theology, modernity conceptualised `God' as the ¢rst principle of the natural world, as the ground of authentic human experience, and as the ontological foundation of the twin liberal virtues of freedom and tolerance.

Chapter 7

Radical a/theology

Might post-modernity enable theology to break free from the constraints of modernity? Our search for an answer to this question begins with a discussion of the anti-realistic tradition of radical a/theology. For many commentators its characteristic denial of the objective reality of God, hostility towards institutional religion, and unapologetic celebration of a transgressive desiredriven spirituality, marks a/theology out as the quintessential post-modern theology. However, as we shall see, its ability to do justice to theological horizons of meaning remains open to question.

The death of God `Could it be possible! This old saint has not yet heard . . . that God is dead !' (Nietzsche 1969: 41). The roots of a/theology are to be found here, in Nietzsche's pronouncement of the `death of God'. His message is addressed not to the pious believer clinging tenaciously to some outmoded religious superstition, but to the new breed of atheist: secure, con¢dent, yet disconcertingly oblivious to the profound consequences of abandoning faith in a Godgiven universal order. As Hans Kung observes, Nietzsche proclaims the death of God `not simply in order to describe the spiritual situation of man and world but . . . to make people aware of the vast consequences of the murder of God' (Kung 1980: 372). Deicide brings about the disintegration of the traditional theological foundations of our sense of truth and meaning, leaving humanity on the edge of a nihilistic abyss, gazing down into a relativistic hell of chaos, angst and despair. Two consequences £ow from the threat of nihilism brought about by the death of God. First, the urgent need to ¢nd a substitute for the departed God. Nietzsche's solution was to create a new trans¢gured humanity, one capable of rising god-like from the ashes of our previous religious servility; a solution ^ we may note in passing ^ not dissimilar to the post-modern celebration of our freedom to re-create reality according to our personal desires, preferences and inclinations. Second, a recognition that the proclamation of the death of God does not bring about the end of theology. Our god-talk

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cannot be allowed to expire into silence: because God's departure from the world carries with it consequences of enormous signi¢cance for our spiritual well being, it is imperative that we construct a theology predicated on the absence of the divine. A key characteristic of Nietzsche's position `was not simply [his] rejection of religion, but rather the seeking out of the implications of atheism for the whole of human life' (Kee 1985: 156). The seeds sown by Nietzsche took time to germinate, and its was not until the 1960s that this death-of-God theology ¢nally came into its own. It was in this decade that liberal Protestantism, driven by a concern to accommodate Christian belief within the culture of modernity, reached the pinnacle of public popularity. Aspects of the liberal theology of Rudolph Bultmann, Paul Tillich and others were gift-wrapped and presented to an increasingly fascinated public, most notably via John Robinson's Honest to God in the UK and Harvey Cox's The Secular City in the USA (Robinson 1963, Cox 1965). The new representation of God as the `ground of our being' and our `ultimate concern', the recasting of religious mythology in the language of existential philosophy, and the promise of a secularised post-ecclesiastical `religionless' Christianity, o¡ered many the hope of a rejuvenated, revitalised and thoroughly modern faith. The theology of the death of God £ourished on the radical fringes of this liberal tradition (Altizer and Hamilton 1968, Buren 1963, Hamilton 1966). Its promise of an immanent, naturalistic, postChristian religiosity is most clearly encapsulated in Thomas Altizer's The Gospel of Christian Atheism (Altizer 1967). Accepting at face value the collapse of realistic theism, yet driven by a desire to continue to write theologically, Altizer set out to explore the spiritual signi¢cance of the death of God. `True, every man today who is open to experience knows that God is absent, but only the Christian knows that God is dead, that the death of God is a ¢nal and irrevocable event, and that God's death has actualised in our history a new and liberated humanity' (111). In this sentence we encounter the key theological themes that were to provide the foundations of a/theology: the unquestioning acceptance of atheism as a brute fact, the desire to make sense of a secular world haunted by the traces of the departed God, and the hope for a new rejuvenated spiritual order. Altizer's theology pilfers from the linguistic resources of Christianity. He re-envisions traditional kenotic Christology ^ which spoke of Christ divesting himself of his omnipotence and omniscience in the incarnation ^ to construct a post-Christian myth in which God empties himself into non-existence, the cruci¢xion acting as a potent symbol of our emancipation, once and for all, from an authoritarian and arbitrary deity. `The Incarnation represents the collapse of radical transcendence into radical immanence. The God who was not only remote from the world, but always somehow against the world, has come to an end' (Kee 1985: 129). Altizer imposes on the ancient Christian hymn that provided the major source of kenotic teaching an interpretation clearly at odds with its original meaning (Philippians 2:6¡ ). His theological method is simply to

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give free rein to the creative imagination in reimagining and re-representing traditional doctrine as a means of reinforcing a preconceived theological position. In a very real sense there is not much more to be said since a/theology, as will become clear, simply regurgitates this death-of-God theology in the style, language and rhetoric of post-modern philosophy.

Don Cupitt's theology of desire The writings of Don Cupitt make plain the direct link between modern theology of the death of God and post-modern a/theology. Taking Leave of God, his classic statement of non-realistic theology, argues that belief in an objective God `out there' is no longer credible in the modern world (Cupitt 1980). The lack of any justi¢able intellectual foundation for belief in God results in a religious life that, due to its naive dependence on external authority, tends towards the vulgar and puerile. Cupitt argues that we must let go of the vestiges of objective theism and learn to use theology as a cipher for our higher spiritual experiences: `God is the religious concern rei¢ed; the demands and promises of spirituality in coded form' (Cowdell 1988: 18). Cupitt, at this stage in his development, is still a modern theologian striving for a spiritual understanding of the ultimate meaning and purpose of life on earth. `The highest and central principle of spirituality . . . is the one that commands us to become spirit, that is, precisely to attain the highest degree of autonomous self-knowledge and self-transcendence' (Cupitt 1980: 9). Cupitt's pilgrimage towards a/theology becomes clear in Only Human, which sets out to challenge the Augustinian tradition of Christian Humanism (Cupitt 1985). His critique draws on readings of the disciplines of geology, biology, psychology, social anthropology and comparative religion inspired by Foucault. The humanistic reference point, central to Taking Leave of God, is now decisively rejected: just as we have previously taken leave of God, so we must now bid farewell to the belief that there is any transcendent goal, essential human nature or humanistic ideal for us to discover and live up to. The entire modernist project, rooted as it is in a search for the ultimate meaning and purpose of life, must be abandoned. `Once we have become fully conscious of our languages and other forms of symbolic communication as sign-systems through which every thinkable and knowable is mediated, then we see that there can be no sense in the idea of transcending language' (xi). Hence all that remains, and here Cupitt draws directly on Derrida, is our fragmentary and all-too-human language. Cupitt comes to accept that his non-realistic search for meaning in Taking Leave of God simply repeated the mistakes of traditional realistic theology, both being caught up in the modernist strategy of striving for ultimate truth. The central task of his emergent post-modern theology `is not to substitute new and up-to-date doctrines for old and worn-out ones, but to learn a new kind of religious existence that is no longer based on doctrines in the old way'

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(x). No longer concerned with questions of ultimate truth, Cupitt begins to advocate a radical religious pluralism that celebrates spiritual diversity for its own sake. The `scepticism, pluralism and historical eclecticism' espoused by post-modernity enables society to `shelter a great variety of spiritualities; a greater variety, indeed, than was permitted by the traditional metaphysics of theism-and-atheism' (Cupitt 1986: 220). Beyond the dialogue between theism and atheism lies a/theology. In The Long-legged Fly Cupitt's new spirituality is presented in its full glory (Cupitt 1987). Modernity, in nurturing a critical self-consciousness, created the tools of its own deconstruction: ultimately Descartes' programme of systematic doubt caused not only the classical Greco-Roman and JudaeoChristian visions of transcendent truth to implode on themselves, but also the meta-narratives of modernity itself, as post-modernity recast the modern hermeneutic of suspicion as the practice of deconstruction. As a result we now ¢nd ourselves in an entirely new post-modern situation in which reality is utterly contingent and `there is no longer any absolute Beginning, Ground, Presence or End in the traditional metaphysical sense' (7). The primary task of the post-modern theologian is to articulate a new aesthetic theology of desire. This, Cupitt contends ^ in an argument remarkably similar to that of Altizer ^ is the authentic message of the doctrine of the incarnation: `the Eternal descends into the contingent world and is di¡used through it . . . the Word has become £esh and body has become language' (8). Theological language, stripped of its traditional connection with the ultimate order-ofthings, simply provides the theologian with the raw material for the unbounded free play of sign and symbol that forms the basis of a posthumanistic spirituality of excess, consumption and desire. Post-modernism `has the e¡ect of dissolving the individual into the endless £ux of di¡erence . . . condemned to an endless recycling of tradition, an aesthetic contemplation of the play of received signs' (12). Just as Baudrillard's linguistic idealism £owed directly from the dislocation of romantic sensibility from any objective referent, so Cupitt's a/theology proceeds from the dislocation of religious experience from any divine reality. His earlier theological anti-realism had the e¡ect of throwing him back onto the resources of his private spiritual experience, and from there it was but a short step from the modern assumption that spiritual experience connects us to some transcendent reality to the post-modern assumption that spiritual meaning is something we must create for ourselves. If it is true that we are all masters of our own personal spiritual identities, then there is nothing to stop us continuously reinventing ourselves and our spiritual universes according to our private preferences and desires. The threat of being manipulated by a despotic God is removed once and for all, since we have claimed for ourselves the attributes of the departed deity. Masters at last of our own universe, we stand omnipotent and omniscient astride whatever world we choose to create. Cupitt's theological pilgrimage treads a direct path from his initial

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pre-modern faith in an objective God, through his modern commitment to the essential spiritual nature of humanity, to a post-modern a/theistic celebration of unconstrained spiritual desire.

Mark C. Taylor's erring theology There are signi¢cant parallels between the theologies of Don Cupitt and Mark C. Taylor: both identify themselves with the theological avant-garde; both deny the intellectual and moral viability of objective theism; both position themselves in the borderlands between belief and unbelief; both seek to reconstruct theology through the resources of post-modern philosophy; and both give aesthetic sensibility priority over questions of realistic truth. Taylor presents himself as an `erring' theologian: liminal, transitional, marginal, nomadic, wandering (Taylor 1982, 1987). His theology is selfconsciously transgressive: `an a/theology that . . . will invert established meaning and subvert everything once deemed holy' (Taylor 1987: 6). He sets out to undermine the traditional polarities of western monotheism by deconstructing the dyadic distinctions on which it depends: theism/atheism, God/world, eternity/time, truth/error, good/evil, innocence/guilt. Hence the nomenclature `a/theology': `erring thought is neither properly theological nor nontheological, theistic nor atheistic, religious nor secular, believing nor non-believing' (12). Abandoning the modern quest for truth opens up a brave new world of spiritual potential and possibility: `inverting and subverting the poles between which Western theology has been suspended, deconstruction reverses itself and creates a new opening for the religious imagination' (11). In Erring: A Postmodern A/theology Taylor explores four key concepts: `God', `self ', `history' and `book'. After deconstructing their logocentric roots and revealing their hidden modernist contradictions he proceeds to rewrite them rhetorically within a post-modern frame of reference: God is transformed into `writing', self is reduced to `trace', history becomes `erring' and the book is re-read as `text'. We will examine each of these shifts in turn. First, the transformation of God into writing. According to Taylor atheists reject the tyranny of an omnipotent and omniscient God in order to secure human dignity and freedom, in the process transforming theology into anthropology and assigning the traditional attributes of divinity to the human creature. The result, however, is simply the replacement of one regime of power with another. The rejection of an authoritarian deity leads directly to the creation of a demonic humanity: the `inversion of divinity and humanity that results from humanistic atheism issues in a ceaseless quest for total control and sovereign domination' (25). If, however, we attempt to understand the advent of atheism in Christological rather than historical terms, then a new way of conceiving the tripartite relationship between God, humanity and power emerges. The concept of Christ as the Word of God

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invites us to re£ect imaginatively and creatively on theological language. Why not interpret the incarnate logos as writing and treat language itself as the authentic divine milieu and true location of divinity, rather than insisting on some transcendent location beyond time and space? Just as writing constitutes the never-ending interplay of presence and absence, identity and di¡erence, so the story of the cruci¢xion of the God-man may be reimagined as a proclamation of the never-ending deferral of ultimate truth and meaning. In a manner closely paralleling the Christological speculations of Altizer and Cupitt, Taylor presents the cruci¢xion as the ultimate sign that all our striving for mastery and knowledge must come to an end: the death of God marks the eternal absence of ultimate truth and hence our emancipation from all authoritarian power-structures. Second, the reduction of self to trace. Taylor notes the intricate relationship between western images of God and human identity. Since the time of Augustine self-knowledge has been mediated by knowledge of God: to know myself is to understand my relationship with God, to grasp my place in the divinely ordained order-of-things, to learn to live out my life sub specie aeternitatis. The belief that I am made in God's image, and that God's story is in some unfathomable way also my story, drives my search for identity, meaning and purpose. There are twin dangers here: if I submit myself completely to the will of God then I give God the authority to act as a tyrant; if, on the other hand, I elect to assert my will over the will of God then I myself become tyrannical. However, once God is re-envisaged as writing and encountered merely as a trace within the chaotic £ow of language, then my enforced search for a meaningful identity is brought to an end and I am freed to construct, deconstruct and reconstruct myself as I see ¢t. The result is the dissolution of the self, since personal identity is transformed into an `anonymous subjectivity, in which care-less sacri¢ce takes the place of anxious mastery and unreserved spending supplants consuming domination' (15). This loss of identity functions as a source of salvation and emancipation, since the death of the subject opens up the possibility of encountering traces of potential new identities and discovering alternative ways of being in the world. `Neither completely undi¡erentiated nor entirely separate, the deconstructed ``subject'' is situated in the midst of multiple and constantly changing relations' (135). The dissolution of my old self enables me to celebrate the new-found freedom to be transgressive, nomadic and erring. As I am emancipated from the obligation to live an authentic life, be true-tomyself, and discover my true identity, so I become the concrete incarnation of that ceaseless interplay of desire and delight that enables me to be the person I wish to be, rather than the person I ought to be. Third, history becomes errant. Classical Christian theology envisions history `plotted along a line that stretches from a de¢nite beginning through an inde¢nite middle to an expected end . . . bound to the notion of a providential creator God' (14). This view of history is essentially eschatological

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and Christocentric: Christ as divine logos constitutes the centre of time, joining beginning and end, creation and consummation, in a uni¢ed, purposeful and providential order. Such theology, according to Taylor, is driven by a concern to master time by comprehending life as a meaningful totality moving towards some ultimate destiny, and as such re£ects the desire to overcome ¢nitude and achieve immortality. However, with the cruci¢xion of the God-man, the alpha and omega, all striving after origins and destiny can ¢nally cease. We are emancipated from history, free to become nomadic, serpentine and erring. Though our wandering is now directionless, it is not to be equated with some kind of enforced exile, since our `pro¢tless play can overcome the unhappy consciousness of the historical agent' (15). As we wander aimlessly through the eternally festive carnival of life so we embody what Taylor labels, in his familiar punning style, `mazing grace': the levity of comedy replaces the gravity of tragedy as transcendence, interiority and depth gives way to a labyrinthine play of surfaces across which we gracefully and graciously wander as erring vagrants, outlaws, renegades and (indeed) perverts (150). This, according to Taylor, is a cause for celebration, since if we have nowhere to go then there is no point in worrying whether we will ever arrive at our destination. If God died on the cross then we are emancipated from the power of religion itself: no longer driven to seek the narrow path that leads to salvation, no longer bound to strive to achieve some beati¢c vision, no longer forced to submit ourselves to the will of God, no longer plagued with the irritating demands of a personal relationship with our creator. Fourth, the re-reading of book as text. According to Taylor the `Book of Scripture' is totalitarian because it claims ultimate authority over me: it is here that my personal identity and history is inscribed; here that I ¢nd myself caught in a tightly knit web of signs and signi¢cation; here that I am mesmerised by the promise of the eschatological ful¢lment and consummation of my life; here that the true meaning of my existence is ¢nally and totally revealed as I stand naked, exposed and vulnerable before the judgement seat of my creator. The good news proclaimed by Taylor is that things need not be so, provided we re-envisage the `closed book' as an `open text'. The unending play of surfaces discloses the ineradicable duplicity of knowledge, shiftiness of truth, and undecidability of value. Since there is no transcendental signi¢ed to anchor the activity of signi¢cation, freely £oating signs cannot be tied down to any single meaning. Everything inscribed within the divine milieu is thoroughly transitional and radically relative. (16) Open texts point beyond themselves towards yet more texts in a neverending £ow of language, an everlasting word-play in which the death of the

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author-god, the death of my essential identity, and the death of meaning are all rehearsed. As Gerald Loughlin points out, according to Taylor `language is like a vast and endless maze, in which we are forever running, turning this way and that, but never ¢nding a centre or an exit' (Loughlin 1996: 11). Interpretation of the open text `does not unveil established meaning but produces new meanings that have not previously been realised . . . interpretation extends the text through an endless process of multiplication, pluralization, and dispersal' (Taylor 1987: 180). The key hermeneutical principle at work in this attempt to construct an a/theology from the debris of the collapse of classical theism is clearly that of absolute freedom from constraint. The death of the God/man Jesus Christ functions as a symbol of the rejection of all authority, both human and divine, and invites us to embrace a vision of our complete emancipation from all relationships that we are unable to control for ourselves. It is on this basis that Taylor claims the freedom to reimagine the Christian story in a manner that supports his a/theological vision.

New Age spirituality The nature of a/theology may be clari¢ed further by considering its a¤nity with certain aspects of contemporary spiritual practice. Anti-realist theology £ourished, initially at least, on the margins of mainstream Christianity. There can be little doubt that in any other age a theology that rejected the existence of an objective God would have been condemned as heretical. That this did not happen is due, at least in part, to the church's awareness of its historical culpability in adopting `heresy' as a political term designed to justify violent persecution. Theologically speaking, of course, the term simply labels `those teachings, internal to Christianity, which are judged so to distort the faith from within that it ceases to be authentically Christian' (Gunton 2002: 86). If the church was not anxious to expel the theological radicals, so they in turn were not anxious to leave; indeed, one of the roles of Cupitt's Sea of Faith Network was to provide support for those non-realists who wished to remain part of the Christian community. However, as Cupitt's theology took increasingly radical turns, so his recognition of the boundaries demarcating di¡erent religious traditions diminished, opening the door to a more eclectic and liquid spirituality operating beyond the boundaries of institutional religion. As we have seen, at the heart of a/theology stands the belief that we are free to draw on a variety of religious traditions, customs and languages in order to construct, on the basis of personal desire and preference, our own personal spiritual reality. This position resonates with the eclectic spirituality of the so-called `New Age'. Though a direct causal connection is not being proposed ^ there is no suggestion of a practical application of the theory of a/theology ^ the family resemblance is unmistakable. Since both clearly

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inhabit the same post-modern spiritual world it appears likely that a consideration of New Age spirituality will further illuminate a/theology. Paul Heelas has identi¢ed three key assumptions underlying what he terms the `self-spirituality' of the New Age movement (Heelas 1996: 18¡ ). First, that life, at least as conventionally experienced, is not what it should be. In the modern world we are de¢ned by mechanistic social structures, brainwashed by mainstream culture, and hence dislocated from authentic experience: to `live in terms of such mores, inculcated by parents, the educational system and other institutions, is to remain the victim of unnatural, deterministic and misguided routines' (18). Second, that it is possible to escape from such inauthenticity by turning away from `normal' society and discovering deep within ourselves a latent spark of divinity. `The inner realm, and the inner realm alone, is held to serve as the source of authentic vitality, creativity, love, tranquillity, wisdom, power, authority and all those other qualities which are held to compromise the perfect life' (19). Third, that we can secure such salvation by utilising a range of spiritual techniques, rituals and psycho-technologies that will enable us to achieve emancipation not merely from the tyranny of society, but also from the tyranny of our unreconstructed selves. The New Age commitment to an unmediated individualism, rooted in unquali¢ed ethical and spiritual freedom, enables us to transcend the ego, which is held responsible for internalising the repressive power-structures of society. `The Self must be liberated; ``de-identi¢cation'' must be e¡ected; the person must drop ``ego-attachments'' ' (20). Reacting against rationalism by a¤rming the value of spiritual experience, and seizing the opportunity to follow our deepest instincts, frees us to construct whatever spiritual reality we like. The New Age movement is closely associated with neo-paganism. I am using this generic term here to refer to an eclectic mix of gnostic, pantheistic, polytheistic, mystical, occult and nature-centred spiritual traditions that, having been suppressed for many centuries by the dominance of western monotheism, are currently undergoing something of a resurgence as they are taken up and recast within the mind-set of the New Age. The word `pagan' needs to be approached with caution: derived from the Latin paganus, it was used originally to refer to uneducated rustic villagers, but developed into a term of abuse applied to those who elected not to adhere to the dominant (normally Christian) religion. In recent years, however, it has been taken up as a positive term by pagans themselves. Carl Braaten has de¢ned neo-paganism as a cluster of modern variations on the belief, held by pre-Christian mystery religions, `that a divine spark or seed is innate in the individual human soul. Salvation consists of liberating the divine essence from all that prevents its true self-expression. The way of salvation is to turn inward and ``to get in touch with oneself '', as people say today' (Braaten 1995: 7). Neo-paganism certainly resonates with the romantic belief that introspective self-re£ection will lead us to the essence of

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ourselves, to the `god-within'. Nevertheless the strategy, widespread amongst neo-pagans, of adopting a pick-and-mix approach to esoteric spiritual traditions, scavenging amongst them in order to collect the raw material with which to create a personal spiritual world-view, resonates strongly with postmodernity in general, and the agenda of a/theology in particular. Since there ares no ¢xed criteria for selection from the various traditions on o¡er, neo-pagans are, generally speaking, free to pick and choose on the basis of personal desire and inclination. Consequently the mark of authenticity of any particular version of neo-paganism is that of its pragmatic success: if the creation of a speci¢c spiritual outlook has the psychological e¡ect of freeing adherents from the pressures of `normal' society and liberating them from the domination of their own egos, then it has served its purpose; if it fails to do so, then there is always the option of selecting another ad hoc collection of beliefs, artefacts, symbols and practices in the hope that these will prove more useful. Various themes pertinent to both the New Age and neo-paganism are re£ected in aspects of contemporary dance culture. As the apologist and chronicler Simon Reynolds makes clear, dance culture e¡ectively shifts the search for spiritual release beyond the boundaries of religion, be they pagan or traditional. Reynolds views rave culture as a deeply spiritual `matrix of lifestyle, ritualized behaviour and beliefs', and his use of quasi-religious language ^ `vision quest', `hunger for heaven-on-earth', `oceanic mysticism' ^ is deliberate and unmistakable (Reynolds 1998: xviii). He invokes the medieval tradition of Christian mysticism to describe an Ecstacy-induced experience at London's `most hedonistically crazed gay club', Trade: `Borne aloft in the cradling rush of sound, swirling up and away into a cloud of unknowing, for the ¢rst time I truly grasped what it was to be ``lost in music'' ' (xxvii). This is a self-consciously transgressive spirituality: nubile boys, stripped to the waist . . . blissed girls, eyes closed, carving strange hieroglyphic patterns in the air . . . the Dionysian paroxysm programmed and looped for eternity . . . dance £oor functionalism and druggy hedonism . . . a soundtrack to going mental and getting fucked up . . . a cartography of adventure and forbidden pleasures. (xvi^xviii) At the heart of the culture is the drug Ecstacy (MDMA), its chemically produced promise of salvation o¡ering `an overwhelming feeling of joy or rapture . . . [an] ``arti¢cial sanity'' that temporarily quietens the neurotic self, freeing the individual from anxiety and fear' (xxii, xxiv). Take Ecstacy, observes Reynolds, and you will `feel more alive, more sensitized, more human' (xxxi). Here, clearly, is a spirituality in which the ecstatic dissolution of the self, accompanied by the satisfaction of desire for desire's sake, rules supreme. In contemporary dance culture the rejection of `ordinary' society

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and the traditional constraints of selfhood is inextricably linked to the freedom to both experience and express an emancipatory and transgressive spirituality. The New Age movement, neo-paganism and contemporary dance culture share at least three traits in common: a striving for freedom from the in£uence of `normal' society and its supposedly su¡ocating structures; a turn inwards, leading to the discovery and acceptance of our most basic instincts; and the self-creation of a life-style that addresses the immediate subjective spiritual needs of the individual regardless of any concern for objective truth. Harold Bloom has suggested that such self-spirituality is more widespread than the present discussion of its counter-cultural manifestations implies. He argues that such quasi-gnosticism actually constitutes `the hidden religion of the United States, the American Religion proper' (Bloom 1992: 50, cf. Braaten and Jenson 1995: 4). `The God of the American Religion' he contends, `is an experiential God, so radically within our own being as to become a virtual identity with what is most authentic (and oldest and best) in the self ' (Bloom 1992: 259). No longer interested in questions of truth, contemporary society is concerned merely with the striving for a spirituality that works on a pragmatic level, one that takes us out of the drudgery of everyday existence and o¡ers us a re-enchanted world in which we can become fully attuned to our personal `god-within'. The result, to borrow the language of Steve Bruce, is a `serial promiscuity' in which we £it at will between religion, denomination, cult and sect in search for something that will bring us the spiritual satisfaction that western materialism has failed to provide (Bruce 1996). Be that as it may, whether we elect to follow Bloom's broader argument or not, it remains clear that the intellectual tradition of a/theology, allied as it is with a variety of counter-cultural manifestations of alternative spiritualities, constitutes a signi¢cant recasting and reimagining of religiosity in the post-modern era.

The poverty of a/theology We turn then to an analysis, critique and evaluation of a/theology. Is there anything here of lasting value that might form the basis of a new paradigm for religious education? The basic position adopted by a/theology can be simply stated: the deconstruction of the meta-narratives of both classical theology and modern humanism has been completed; their claims to present ultimate truth have been revealed as intellectually untenable and morally repugnant; we are left with an excess of religious signs and symbols that bear no relationship to any ultimate order-of-things; and, since the only spiritual reality is that which we create for ourselves, we are free to reorder our religious heritage in whatever way we choose, according to our personal desires, inclinations and prejudices. It is clear from this summary that a/theology is, in essence, a restatement of Baudrillard's hyper-realistic version of post-

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modernism presented in religious and theological language. The following critique will identify four fundamental problems with the outlook of a/theology. First, a/theology is intellectually insular: it lacks curiosity, fails to engage with alternative positions, and strenuously avoids self-scrutiny. There is little interest in the substance of classical theology and no engagement with theological responses to post-modernity other than its own. It is content to dismiss a caricature of modernity, and shows no depth of awareness of the selfcritique that modern thought has subjected itself to. Above all a/theology appears blind to the diversity of post-modern philosophy itself, failing to heed Derrida's insistence that deconstruction must avoid any premature closure of thought and his warning of the dangers of turning post-modernity into yet another modern meta-narrative. The sense of ¢nality and completion encountered in the account of religion presented by a/theology, coupled with the barely disguised evangelical zeal of its proponents, has a distinctly modern feel about it. There appears to be a fundamental contradiction at the very heart of a/theology: despite the rhetoric giving priority to the `open text' over the `closed book' a/theology presents a remarkably narrow worldview, one grounded in an epistemology of absolute relativism and a metaphysic of linguistic idealism. In e¡ect a/theology constitutes a theological meta-narrative that claims to reject all theological meta-narratives, and propounds the religious truth claim that there is no such thing as religious truth. From this narrow vantage point it interacts with alternative positions only as a scavenger, feeding on the remains of belief systems it assumes, a priori, to be dead and gone. Second, a/theology displays a theological naivety. We have seen how the cruci¢xion of Jesus Christ is presented by Altizer, Cupitt and Taylor as symbolic of the closure of the search for ultimate truth. This reading is notable for its lack of concern for the role the cross plays within classical Christian theology: the traditional dogmatic themes of salvation, redemption and atonement are simply passed over in silence. Instead the cruci¢xion is interpreted through a preconceived theological key that bears no relationship to the original theological narrative. A/theology approaches the Gospel narratives secure in the knowledge that the notion of theological truth is redundant, and proceeds to impose its a priori assumptions onto the biblical text in a series of arbitrary acts of creative imagination. This raises a crucial question: What constitutes the criteria for a `correct' theological judgement for the a/theologian? The answer, it seems, is simply one that con¢rms the pre-given world-view of a/theology and thereby satis¢es the desires of the a/theologian. If this is so then the inevitable conclusion to be drawn is that a/theology possesses no substantial content or hermeneutical method that would enable it to develop or reshape the particular version of postmodernity to which it is committed. It is reduced to the role of constructing ¢ctional narratives in order to imaginatively represent its prior post-modern

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commitments. The cost of this process ^ and it is a considerable one ^ is the reduction of theology to empty rhetoric. Insistent on joining the postmodern game of arbitrary reality creation, the contribution of a/theology to this `lego-land' philosophy is simply the introduction of a new set of cultural bricks drawn from the domain of religion, o¡ered without blueprint, creative vision or any sense of self-critique. As Cowdell observes, `if Cupitt is convinced he has the critical game sewn up' then he must then be willing to `begin to ask meta-critical questions in order to deconstruct his own biases, not least of which is his quasi-positivistic limiting of the range of admissible evidence for theological re£ection' (Cowdell 1988: 58). Third, a/theology is morally vacuous. Far from being radical or prophetic, the spirituality of a/theology actually feeds on the rampant consumer culture of western capitalism. Since the desires of the individual are sacred and the right to purchase unlimited, a/theology ¢nds itself committed to, and consequently trapped within, an economy of spiritual consumption. The principle of absolute freedom of choice disguises the possibility that such consumption might be driven by repressive market forces, or that reliance on one's own spiritual imagination might itself constitute a form of solipsistic captivity. As Graham Ward observes, a/theologians `can only advocate freedom through abandoning oneself to the e¡ervescent £ux of the leisure society to which they belong' (Ward 1997: 586). This lack of moral sensitivity leads a/theology to transform ethical practice into ontological reality. `Individualism used to mean the freedom to dissent; now it means the right to determine, not simply what one likes to do, but what is the case. It has grown from being a political and behavioural principle to being an ontological device' (Bruce 1998: 28). A/theology promises a spiritual carnival at which we can celebrate a lifestyle of transgression and excess. The `joyful a¤rmation for these theologians issues from embracing the sheer contingent meaninglessness of existence' (Ward 1997: 592). This life-style choice is, of course, the prerogative of only a tiny minority of the human race, those whose freedom is not constrained by the daily struggle for food, shelter, employment and security. It is by no means clear how self-absorption in the task of constructing and celebrating one's own spiritual identity might prove capable of addressing the fundamental ethical dilemmas facing humanity today. Can the challenges of terrorism, poverty, unrestrained global capitalism and threatened ecological disaster be met simply by imagining a better world? The core problem here is that the transgressive messianic banquet of a/theology is predicated on a self-centred solipsistic freedom from others, rather than a relational freedom for mutual care and responsibility. According to Rowan Williams, Cupitt's metaphysics constitutes a `projection, a ¢ction, a noble and unmoved classical countenance out-facing the misery of human a¡airs, somehow consoling by being indestructible' (Williams 1994: 9).

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Fourth, a/theology is self-contradictory by virtue of its commitment to the modern ideal of progress. As we have seen, post-modernity as a rule rejects the notion of history as linear progress, whether envisaged in terms of a traditional theological eschatology or modern evolutionary theory, in favour of a notion of cyclical time. History is envisaged as a series of everlasting repetitions constantly turning back on themselves, repetitions which are not directed towards any ultimate goal and which do not embody any ultimate meaning or purpose. Yet it is clear that both Cupitt and Taylor continue to embrace a linear understanding of progress, proclaiming in no uncertain terms the closure of modernity and the advent of a new post-modern spiritual age. Hence their celebration of an a/theological spiritual sensibility is predicated on the very modernist mind-set they seek to overcome. The postmodern kingdom is at hand: now is the time when modernity will be overthrown, when humanity will ¢nally come of age, and when the dark age of realistic theology will give way to a new a/theological dawn. There is here no recognition of Derrida's insistence that post-modernity can never escape history, only ever make mischief within it: where for Derrida post-modernity is a critical moment within modernity, for the a/theologians post-modernity constitutes a new epoch beyond modernity. We are now in a position to pull together the threads of this critique of a/theology. In the ¢rst place it is internally incoherent since ^ despite all the rhetoric ^ it remains committed to its own universal meta-narrative, predicated on linguistic idealism and buttressed by the belief that a/theology stands at the cutting edge of human progress. In the second place it fails culpably to demonstrate its superiority over other viable intellectual positions, and is unlikely to do so if it continues to respond to stereotypical images of both modernity and classical theology rather than risk engaging with their substantial content. We can leave the last word to Graham Ward, who contends that a/theology o¡ers `yet another grand explanatory narrative' that, due to its incoherence and intellectual fragility, is destined to see `its metaphors dispersed, its sacred space converted into a theme park' (Ward 1997: 592). This chapter identi¢ed a/theology as one particular strand of post-modern religious thought. Following on from Nietzsche's proclamation of the death of God, and resonating closely with aspects of contemporary spirituality, Cupitt and Taylor a¤rm the intellectual and moral redundancy of classical realistic theology and advocate in its place a post-modern theology of desire in which we are free to create our own spiritual realities on the basis of our personal preferences and inclinations. The conclusion is unavoidable: just as modernity domesticated God within its foundational meta-narratives, so a/theology forces the divine into the straitjacket of an anti-realistic ideology.

Chapter 8

The mystery of the world

The legacy of the Enlightenment, in particular the belief in the omnicompetence of human reason, has clearly left its mark on theological discourse. Our examination of modern theology and post-modern a/theology in the previous two chapters has revealed a common pattern of theological thinking at work: the basic task of theology is conceived as that of recasting traditional theological discourse in ways that conform to, and hence buttress and justify, the received presuppositions of the theologian, whether these be naturalistic, romantic, liberal or anti-realistic. The resulting domestication of God rules out any possibility of theology being a transformative activity capable of challenging the normative understanding of reality within which the theologian works. Little wonder, if all it is capable of o¡ering is a conservative reinforcement of the intellectual and cultural status quo, that theology is perceived by many to be a redundant activity. But what if human reason is not the ultimate measure of reality? What if the foolishness of God is greater than human wisdom? At the heart of the world's religious traditions stands a range of contrasting and often contradictory beliefs concerning the possibility of the transformation of the received order-of-things through some higher power, being or divinity. If there is truth in any of these traditional religious positions then the logical conclusion to be drawn is that this higher reality must somehow constitute the measure of our humanity. It follows that our struggle for self-understanding demands our submission to the judgement of that which is greater than us, rather than our reliance on any self-appointed criteria of evaluation and measurement. However unfashionable it appears to the zeitgeist of contemporary culture, this fundamental imperative drives much, if not all, pre-modern religious thought. It follows that theological discourse, insofar as it is capable of being truthful to a higher reality (and there are of course many fundamental problems to be addressed here), retains the possibility of becoming a transformational discourse capable of radically challenging our received prejudices, assumptions and presuppositions. This chapter attempts to explore ways in which the commitment of Levinas, Derrida and others to an open post-modernism concerned with

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alterity and the voice of the Other, standing as it does at the opposite end of the post-modern spectrum from Baudrillard's closed hyper-realistic antirealism, opens up the possibility of recovering a transformative theological discourse. If Cupitt and Taylor's a/theology presides over the premature closure of theological thinking, can the theology of Levinas and Derrida keep open the horizon of transcendence, alterity and Otherness? Can the domesticated theism of modern theology and post-modern a/theology give way to an openness to the possibility of a transcendent re-enchantment of the world? Religion, or at least a signi¢cant dimension of religion, invites us to focus on a transcendent horizon of mystery: to look beyond our fragmented selves towards the hope of an identity transformed by transcendent reality; beyond self-referential language towards the unspeakable; beyond onto-theology towards a hyper-essential theology of excess. We are here in the cultural space established by Georges Bataille's exploration of `desire' (Bataille 1985, 1988, 1989). For Bataille genuine desire is marked not by a self-serving accumulation in which product is bought, owned and consumed, but by an economy of expenditure, excess and gift. Here the ephemeral self, driven by laughter, eroticism, death and sacri¢ce, strives to be receptive to channels of communication which proceed from that which lies beyond. Similarly Levinas invites us to gaze upon the face of the Other: to allow our meaning to be transformed by that which stands over against us; to open ourselves to alterity, di¡erance and the in¢nity of the Other; to respond to the ethical imperative the Other imposes on us, an imperative of absolute responsibility and care. Our concern, then, is for those thinkers for whom the religious signi¢cance of post-modernity lies not in any a/theological meta-narrative but in a fundamental orientation towards alterity and mystery that is resistant to any form of premature closure.

Transformative history Both modernity and post-modernity tend to be dismissive of the signi¢cance of the past for our understanding of the present. Modernity achieves this through a myth of historical progress in which the present supersedes, and consequently negates, the past. As Cassirer notes, `it is customary to consider it a major shortcoming of this [modern] epoch that it lacked understanding of the historically distant and foreign, and that in naive overcon¢dence it set up its own standards as the absolute, and only valid and possible, norm for the evaluation of historical events' (Cassirer 1951: x). The post-modern rejection of the past has its roots in Nietzsche's myth of eternal recurrence, in which cyclical time replaces the forward momentum of linear time. If history constantly turns in on itself in a series of meaningless and directionless repetitions then there can be no expectation that the past has anything of value to teach us. This position is reinforced by Foucault's post-modern genealogical

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and archaeological readings of cultural and intellectual history, which claim to reveal the essentially contingent and ephemeral nature of the past. On both counts the past is irrelevant and uninteresting: on the one hand because modernity rei¢es and makes absolute the present, on the other because postmodernity dissolves the past into an endless sequence of contingent repetitions. Contrary to this negation of the past, alteristic forms of post-modernity are concerned to open up the possibility of encountering historical horizons of meaning capable of subverting our given assumptions, thereby expanding our sense of the mystery of the universe and opening the door to its re/enchantment. Our discussion begins with Kierkegaard, whose reading of the £ux of existence di¡ers markedly from that of Nietzsche (Kierkegaard 1983: 125¡ ). Though he follows Nietzsche in rejecting Hegel's belief in the inevitable progress of civilisation, he denies that this leaves us trapped in a meaningless cycle of eternal recurrence. On the contrary, the phenomenon of repetition ^ the fact that similar moral and spiritual dilemmas frequently repeat themselves, in a variety of forms, both in our own lives and throughout history ^ enables us to escape from a momentary £eeting existence and strive to secure an enduring personal identity. We can identify with ¢gures from the past because we face similar challenges, and just as we can learn from our own past successes and failures, so we can learn from the successes and failures of those who lived before us. In order to learn from history we must move beyond a merely aesthetic recollection of the past which o¡ers nothing more than a £eeting nostalgia that ultimately leads only to despair. The experience of repetition enables moral identity to be established by reading the present in terms of both past history and future hope. According to Kierkegaard the contingencies of history are not disposable; rather they constitute a rich source for developing an understanding of the meaning and purpose of life. For Michel Certeau history, properly understood, embraces a core openness to transcendent mystery (Certeau 1995). He rejects modern approaches to the past, which he conceives as a form of mourning for a past that is dead and a history that is forever absent. The modern age follows the lead of Descartes and, via a hermeneutic of suspicion, turns its back on the authority of the past; chooses to embark on a quasi-scienti¢c representation of historical `facts' that produces nothing but simulacra functioning as deceptive substitutes for that which is no longer available to us; and elects to utilise the past to justify the present, as for example in the periodic labelling of the `Dark Ages' and the `Enlightenment'. In similar vein Certeau also rejects Foucault's post-modern archaeological interrogation of the past that, he believes, strives to negate history by deconstructing the usefulness of the past for the present: in examining `past thought as an archaeologist studies buried cities, [Foucault] sought to bracket questions both of meaning and reference, to lay aside the serious truth claims made by thinkers of the past, and to

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uncover the impersonal regularities and structures which governed their discourse' (Ahearne 1995: 41). Certeau agrees with Foucault that modern representations of the past are distorted by discourses of power, but denies that this justi¢es the abandonment of history as a discipline capable of transforming our understanding of ourselves and re/enchanting the world we indwell. Suggesting that it is possible to discern the traces of alternative pasts, and attend to voices silenced by the passage of time and the transgressions of historiography, he proposes a `heterology'^ a historical discourse of alterity ^ as a means of subverting received stories and recovering alternative narratives. Modern history has e¡ectively silenced the voices of religion through a reading of the past that domesticates God within modern horizons of meaning. By rescuing these from the debris of history we can move towards a transgressive encounter with the past as Other and learn to re-enact religion not as redundant objecti¢ed knowledge, but as a tradition rich in possibility, open to a multiplicity of interpretations, and sensitive to in¢nite mystery. In developing his position Certeau introduces a crucial distinction between the past and our encounter with the past. He uses `reality' to refer both to the `objects' of history and to the interpretative process through which we encounter the past. In doing so he transcends modern attempts to avoid the challenge of the past by the objecti¢cation, rei¢cation or deconstruction of history. `For Certeau, historiographical discourse is not so much detached from ``reality'' (it produces ``reality'' through processes of interpretation) as involved in a ``real'' which it can alter but cannot fully contain' (23). History thus becomes a horizon fundamentally open to alterity, di¡erence and transcendence, all the more so when the religious and mystical dimensions of the past are recovered from the domestication and censorship of both modern theology and post-modern a/theology. He thus invokes an image of the historian as mystic: `the mystic is seized by time as by that which erupts and transforms, which is why time is for him the question of the subject seized by his or her other, in a present that is the ongoing surprise of a birth and a death' (Certeau 1995: 11). Certeau's position receives support from Gadamer, who rejects what he terms the `subjective aestheticism' of history through which modern historiography, in examining the historical texts of the bible and classical antiquity, deliberately brackets out questions of truth (Gadamer 1979: 173). History, for Gadamer, has revelatory and transformational potential. A person trying to understand a text is prepared for it to tell him something. That is why a hermeneutically trained mind must be, from the start, sensitive to the text's quality of newness. But this kind of sensitivity involves neither `neutrality' in the matter of the object nor the extinction of one's self, but the conscious assimilation of one's own foremeanings and prejudices. The important thing is to be aware of one's

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own bias, so that the text may present itself in all its newness and thus be able to assert its truth against one's own fore-meanings. (258, my italics) Both Certeau's alteristic post-modernism and Gadamer's critical realism seek to establish the possibility of re-reading the religious traditions of the past in a manner open to their intrinsic truth claims and sensitive to their spiritual worth. In doing so they strive to keep open the horizon of the religious Other.

A God beyond being? As post-modernity exposes the futility of attempts to construct an ultimate meta-narrative through which the universe is constrained by restrictive frames of reference based on fallible human understanding, so ^ according to advocates of alteristic forms of post-modernity ^ creation is able once more to reveal something of its primordial aura of mystery. In this re/enchanted world we learn to be less quick to impose judgements, more willing to acknowledge the contingency of our thought, and consequently more sensitive to the cognitive, moral, aesthetic and spiritual claims of all that stands beyond our immediate comprehension. As a result God is emancipated from the tyranny of human reason and the tired arguments between theist and atheist are exposed as mere idle chatter in the face of the ultimate mystery of the world. To debate the existence, being and nature of the supreme being is to domesticate God and appropriate the creator as just another object in the world, one subject to the control, policing and judgement of human reason. To claim that God `exists' is to make that which utterly transcends the world just another object within the universal order of being. Recognising this danger Tillich seeks to attribute `being' to God in a quali¢ed manner: `God as being-itself is the ground of the ontological structure of being without being subject to this structure himself ' (Tillich 1978: 239). Despite this quali¢cation the suspicion remains that Tillich's theology goes the way of much modern theology in attempting to approach God from a transcendent vantage point which is not actually available to humanity. Jean-Luc Marion takes this challenge seriously by attempting to construct a post-modern theology that recognises both the limitations of human knowing and the ultimate alterity of God (Marion 1995). If our God-talk is to be authentic then we must recognise that `God' is not just another being in the world, but rather a reality `without' or `beyond' being. Marion is clear that this does not open up a path to some form of non-realistic theology, in which `God' is no more than a pragmatically useful human concept, since the actuality of the divine is, for him at least, not in doubt. To say that God is without being is not to say that the divine does not `exist', but rather to a¤rm the absolute freedom of God with respect to the reality of the world he calls into being out of nothing. The centrality of the metaphysical language

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of `being' in Christian thought is the result of a correlation of theology and philosophy that has dominated the western church following Augustine's Platonic reading of Christianity and Aquinas' interpretation of the faith within Aristotelian categories of thought. For Marion such correlation leads directly to the domestication of God within a set of all-too-human ontotheological meta-narratives. As John Milbank points out in his discussion of Marion's theology, as soon as God's absolute transcendence, freedom, holiness and alterity are taken seriously so it becomes inescapably evident that our theology `requires no philosophical foundations, and presupposes no metaphysical categories, not even that of Being' (Milbank 1997a: 36). For Marion this disengagement of theology from philosophy allows us to recover a sense of the mystery of God, since whenever `theology holds fast to the view that philosophy is foolishness, the mystery character of revelation will be much better preserved' (Marion 1995: 62). Marion argues that we encounter the `God without being' not in our metaphysical or ontological constructions, but rather in the divine otherness that presents itself to us in revelation. This is not revelation appropriated and domesticated by human reason, but rather revelation as pure gift, donation and event, in which God turns his face to humanity in an excess of agape, charity and grace. `God gives Himself to be known insofar as He gives Himself ^ according to the horizon of the gift itself. The gift constitutes at once the mode and the body of his revelation' (xxiv). Authentic theology must be grounded in worship and the true theologian ¢rst and foremost a person of prayer. Though a Roman Catholic, Marion here draws in equal measure on the Barthian tradition of the uncorrelated revelation of the Divine Word and the post-modern commitment to alterity, di¡erence and the Other. As Milbank observes, though Marion's theology rejects any correlation of theology and modern metaphysics, it does so only by establishing a new correlative allegiance between Christian revelation and post-modern thought (Milbank 1997a: 36). Onto-theology, rather than allowing God simply to be God, engenders idolatrous discourses that `re£ect purely metaphysical functions of ``God'' and hide that much more the mystery of God as such' (Marion 1995: xxi). The idol acts as a mirror, re£ecting back the image of the one who gazes; blind to alterity, such idolatry is able to comprehend God only within its own pre-established interpretative framework. `The idol fascinates and captivates the gaze precisely because everything in it must expose itself to the gaze, attract, ¢ll, and hold it' (10). As Feuerbach clearly demonstrated, onto-theology constitutes a projection and rei¢cation of human needs and aspirations as eternal, transcendent and divine (Feuerbach 1957). By revealing the idolatrous nature of much modern theology Feuerbach allows us to see how the rebellion of contemporary atheism, rather than attacking Godas-God, actually constitutes the deconstruction of a false theological idol. This scenario lies at the heart of Buckley's account of the origins of modern

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atheism: the God rejected by modernity is not the Abrahamic God who elects to reveal himself to humanity, but rather an abstract deity constructed by the philosophers and theologians (Buckley 1987). For Marion the reception of revealed theology as divine gift marks a shift from idolatry to iconography, creating a pre/post-modern space in which God-as-God can avoid the threat of domestication. Here theological discourse transgresses the domesticated text, pointing beyond itself towards that which transcends mere language. Instead of the invisible mirror, which sent the human gaze back to itself alone and censured the invisible, the icon opens in a face that gazes at our gazes in order to summon them to its depth . . . [W]hereas the idol measures the divine to the scope of the gaze of he who then sculpts it, the icon accords in the visible only a face whose invisibility is given all the more to be envisaged that its revelation o¡ers an abyss that the eyes of men never ¢nish probing. (Marion 1995: 19, 21) The icon provokes vision and seizes the initiative as it renders visible the invisible and makes present that which is wholly Other. Where the idol con¢rms us where we stand, the icon dislocates and transforms us by immersing us in an excess of invisibility, confronting us with the distance of in¢nite depth, and drawing from us our in¢nite care. But how is it possible to speak of the divine reality revealed by the icon without transforming it into just another idol? One possibility, clearly embraced by Marion, is doxological. If we wish to engage with God-as-God then the only proper response is one of worship, reverence and adoration. `God can give himself to be thought without idolatry only starting from himself alone: to give himself to be thought as love, hence as gift; to give himself to be thought as a thought of the gift' (49). Since love is enhanced rather than damaged by being unthinkable gift, the God of alterity is properly encountered and responded to in the agapeistic context of liturgy, worship and praise, above all in the eucharist. The possibility of a doxological response to the God of alterity will be explored in greater detail in the next chapter. Here we will focus on a second answer to the problem of how to speak the unspeakable without transforming the icon into an idol: negative theology.

Negative theology Marion's `God without being' resonates strongly with the tradition of negative or apophatic theology, which suggests that the only way to begin to comprehend God in his absolute Otherness is not by positively a¤rming who or what God `is' but rather by negatively identifying and stripping away all that God is not. As Aquinas puts it, `because we cannot know what God is,

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but rather what He is not, we have no means for considering how God is, but rather how He is not' (Aquinas 1920: 28). Negative theology certainly has some connection with the sense of the holiness, mystery and transcendence of God that forms such a central feature of western monotheism: `Now we see only re£ections in a mirror, mere riddles, but then we shall be seeing face to face. Now, I can know only imperfectly; but then I shall know just as fully as I am myself known' (1 Corinthians 13:12). However, such a¤rmations of divine alterity need to be approached with some caution since revelation is, by de¢nition, concerned primarily with the unveiling rather than veiling of the face of God (Ford 1999: 107¡ ). Moses, on encountering the God of his ancestors in the theophany of the Burning Bush, immediately `covered his face, for he was afraid to look at God' (Exodus 3:6). Yet the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob elects not to remain a complete mystery to Moses, so that at the time of his death he is recognised as `the man whom Yahweh knew face to face' (Deuteronomy 34:10). Similarly Paul's understanding of revelation is primarily positive in character: `All of us, with our unveiled faces like mirrors re£ecting the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the image that we re£ect in brighter and brighter glory' (2 Corinthians 3:18). The real dynamic behind negative theology stems from the interaction of neo-Platonism and the Judaeo-Christian tradition. The Greek philosopher Plotinus developed Plato's theory of the `forms' by a¤rming as the ¢rst principle of reality the `One' or the `Good': the simple, transcendent and ultimate reality beyond being (Plotinus 1991). The plurality of the world, the `Many', emanated from this `One' to form the great chain of being, and will eventually return to it. Plotinus understood knowledge in terms of our contemplation of successive levels of this chain of being, whilst insisting that the `One' itself remains utterly beyond the powers of human comprehension. Knowledge was both rational and mystical for Plotinus, simultaneously the gathering of insight and the achievement of salvation. The ultimate human good is the return of the soul to its source, its reuniting with the `One'. It was the identi¢cation of the neo-Platonic `One' beyond human understanding with the God of Christian theology in the writings of the mystical theologian Denys the Areopagite that lead to the £owering of negative theology (Pseudo-Dionysius Aeropagita 1980, cf. Balthasar 1984: 144¡, Louth 2002). Denys' eschatological vision anticipated the return of the whole of creation to perfect unity with God via a mystical progression through the stages of puri¢cation, illumination and union. Theologically he looked, particularly in his Mystical Theology, to the transcending of the positive symbolic theology to be found in scripture and the sacraments towards a mystical vision of God beyond language and sign. The journey of the soul towards unity with the source of all being required both the stripping away of all positive theological statements and the passive emptying of the self of all speech as a necessary preparation for entry of the mystic into the silence, mystery

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and darkness of God, conceived as an engagement with the ultimately unknown in an ecstatic union of love. When Denys' mystical theology was taken up by Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century negative theology established itself in the mainstream of western Christian theology. The chief way to consider the divine essence is the way of negation, for by its immensity the divine essence transcends every form attained by our intellect; and so in apprehending it we do not know what it is. But by knowing what it is not we get some knowledge of it, and the more things we are able to deny of it, the nearer we come to knowing it. (Clark (ed.) 1972: 139) For Aquinas the fact that we cannot know God directly through our senses, since God is not a material object, meant that God was unknowable in his essence. Though we can argue from the world to God, and thereby become aware of his existence, such arguments do not reveal the essential being or nature of God. Aquinas, like Plotinus and Denys before him, thus operates with an ultimately agnostic theological scheme. Despite the fact of God's gracious revelation to us, our positive knowledge of God can only ever be a £eeting knowledge, so the best we can a¤rm with any real security is that which God is not. Thus negative theology proceeds from the assertion of the absolute alterity of God. It accepts a positive or cataphatic theology, in which God-talk as positive a¤rmation is possible on the basis of either a natural theology drawn from the evidence provided by the natural world or a revealed theology drawn from scripture and ecclesial tradition. However, the limitations of such positive statements are recognised from the start: our positive language can at best be a partial shadow of the divine reality. Consequently we must turn to negative or apophatic theology, the via negativa, in which we proceed by describing God in terms of what he is not. Thus Marion's assertion that God is `without being' may be read as a classic example of negative theology. Whatever God actually `is', however much we struggle to describe the divine reality, we must ultimately accept that the divine reality so utterly transcends being as we know it that it is more appropriate to describe God as beyond being than a possessor of being. To claim that God `exists' or `possesses being' is to try to domesticate and control that which is beyond our understanding. The temptation to correlate negative theology and the post-modern themes of deconstruction and alterity is, at least on a super¢cial level, di¤cult to avoid. If the dynamic of deconstruction points towards a humble recognition of the ultimate mystery of a reality that transcends our understanding, rather than towards an anti-realism in which we arrogantly claim the freedom to construct a world according to our personal desires and pre-

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ferences, then the resulting openness to the Other appears to share many traits with the negative tradition of apophatic theology.

The theology of Jacques Derrida Derrida's increasingly frequent engagement with religious and theological issues is consistent in viewing `religion' as a problematic category (Derrida 1992, 2002, Derrida and Vattimo (eds) 1998, cf. Coward and Foshay (eds) 1992). Religion, he suggests, is constantly reacting to modernity either by seeking accommodation within modern forms of thought, or by retreating into a ghetto of faith. Consequently he is deeply sceptical about positive religious assertions, oscillating as they do between techno-science and ¢deistic belief, and ¢nds in religion generally `a certain absence of way, path, issue, salvation' (Derrida 2002: 43). He identi¢es three locations where theological discourse shapes our understanding of religion: the island of divine revelation, the promised land of organised, institutionalised, politicised religion, and the desert of spiritual and mystical experience. On the one hand he insists that we must take the language emanating from these spaces seriously, rejects the idea that they can be easily dismissed, and expresses incredulity towards those rational thinkers for whom the `unprecedented resurgence, both global and planetary, of this ageless thing . . . that forms the element of all revelation and of all belief ' comes as a complete surprise (44). On the other hand he ¢nds each of these locations deeply problematical: they are `aporetical places: with no way out or any assured path, without itinerary or point of arrival, without an exterior with a predictable map and a calculable programme' (47). Hence the tension at the heart of Derrida's theological writings: his desire to acknowledge the signi¢cance of the Other identi¢ed by religion, coupled with an acute awareness that to speak directly of God is to destroy the Other. Derrida puts forward, as a provisional hypothesis, the thesis that `negative theology consists of considering that every predicative language is inadequate to the essence, in truth to the hyperessentiality (the being beyond Being) of God; consequently only a negative (``apophatic'') attribution can claim to approach God, and to prepare us for a silent intuition of God' (Derrida 1992: 74). However, he ¢rmly opposes those who seek to ¢nd, in the desert of mystical experience, a correlation between post-modern deconstruction and negative theology. The deconstruction of the meta-narratives of positive onto-theology must not be allowed to open the door to a negative theology of `hyper-essentiality' that seeks to discover the `being' of God beyond being. `I thought I had to forbid myself to write in the register of ``negative theology'', because I was aware of this movement toward hyperessentiality, beyond Being . . . [and] objected in vain to the assimilation of the thinking of the trace or of di¡erance to some negative theology' (79, 82). It is clear from this that Derrida views negative theology as simply a move

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within the enterprise of onto-theology, an attempt to recover a positive theology through the back door. He thus refuses any link between negative theology and `every discourse that seems to return in a regular and insistent manner to this rhetoric of negative determination, endlessly multiplying the defences and the apophatic warnings' (74). Despite such denials Derrida's thinking retains a certain level of ambiguity here. Though resistant to any suggestion that his work lends support to negative theology, he nevertheless accepts that the space of the desert `makes possible, opens, hollows or in¢nitizes the other' (Derrida 2002: 55). As such it retains an openness to the ultimate mystery of the world: `Before and after the logos which was in the beginning, before and after the Holy Sacrament, before and after the Holy Scriptures' (60). He refers to the double-bind of the need to speak and yet not to speak: he is driven to respond to the question of negative theology, yet does so unwillingly, believing that anything he says will be seized upon as either a theological a¤rmation or a denial. This tension is though entirely consistent with Derrida's thoroughgoing hermeneutical agnosticism. On the one hand the condition of post-modernity does not allow us to avoid making positive statements: since there is no neutral ground beyond language, every time we deconstruct a text another text immediately takes its place. On the other hand if we attempt to do anything other than deconstruct the new text that emerges we will be drawn back into modern modes of thinking. Both the non-realism of advocates of a/theology and the negative theology of the classical theologians are, at the end of the day, modernist enterprises. If Derrida is clear that deconstruction cannot legitimately be used as the pathway to a negative hyper-essential theology, since this would in fact constitute nothing more than an onto-theology in disguise, nevertheless he accepts the deserted space between words, the silence between a¤rmation and denial, as being fertile with implied theological meaning and potential. Derrida's agnosticism is re£ected in Marion's own caution against the danger of `double idolatry' in which an insistence on the alterity of the Godbeyond-being merely makes an idol of the human experience of mystery rather than establishing an iconic window open to transcendent mystery. The risk, for both Derrida and Marion, is that the deconstructive act of placing `God' under erasure will simply elevate human experience as the measure of the mystery of the world. If we are able to resist this temptation then we will be able to appreciate that spiritual signi¢cance of the desert space where thought and word expire. `The unthinkable masks the gap, a fault ever open, between God and the idol or, better, between God and the pretension of all possible idolatry' (Marion 1995: 46). Ultimately the evaluation of Derrida's theology remains a point of fundamental dispute. At one extreme Ingra¤a draws attention to the antitheological tenor of Derrida's religious writings, suggesting that he `makes no claims that his work can be used in any theology, whether traditional or new,

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but in his deconstruction of ontotheology he treats Christian theology as a prime example of logo-centric metaphysics' (Ingra¤a 1995: 12). Ingra¤a's reading receives clear support from Derrida himself in his a¤rmation that those `aspects of di¡erance which are thereby delineated are not theological, not even in the order of the most negative theologies' (Derrida 1982: 6). At the other end of the spectrum Rowan Williams views the space created by Derrida's rejection of negative theology as rich with theological meaning. In spite of Derrida's disclaimers, it has proved very hard for religious writers not to read the language of trace and di¡erance as a negative theology. For Derrida himself, it is reasonably clear that `God' is an `e¡ect of the trace': to speak of God is to try to put a face upon that which haunts language ^ what is over the shoulder, round the corner, what is by stipulation not capable of being confronted, being faced. Thus to speak of God is to try and erase the genuine trace: and negative theology (like the negativity of all dialect) simply a¤rms the possibility of a state devoid of this haunting, since it identi¢es trace and di¡erance with a kind of subject, with what is ultimately, despite all theological evasions, presence. (Williams 1992: 72) If we are to make sense of Derrida's religious writings we need to recognise that there is no need to be drawn into an either/or choice between these two options: the internal logic of his understanding of the post-modern situation enables him to simultaneously a¤rm and deny the theological signi¢cance of his position. As Trevor Hart points out, Derrida approaches metaphysics on the basis of alterity rather than identity (Hart 1991). Thus, though he does not seek to identify the space created by deconstruction with God, he is nevertheless willing to imply that God may be seen as the Other veiled by this space. The danger is that negative theology will be appropriated, in a post-modern context, as part of a nostalgic desire to recover the proper name of God. Derrida's understanding of deconstruction, in seeking to locate language in an economy of di¡erance, takes us beyond such an apparently restrictive negative theology. As Hart observes, `if we add the Derridean problematic to theology what results is a general negative theology, one which places the value of the proper name in question, and thus provides us with an account of the only possible way in which a theology can resist the illusions of metaphysics' (269). The line between negative theology as a supplement to positive theology and negative theology as the recognition of the in¢nity of alterity is a ¢ne one, yet it is precisely here that the contribution of post-modernity to theology appears at its most dynamic. It is time to take stock and draw conclusions: it appears possible to read this attempt to re/enchant the world in at least three di¡erent ways. First as a means of a¤rming a reconstituted theological orthodoxy via the path of negative theology. Marion is one of a number of theologians who identify

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a¤nities between post-modern alterity and traditional apophatic theology and seize the opportunity to recast theological orthodoxy within a postmodern framework, invoking a hyper-essential God-beyond-being whose alterity is protected from human domestication and who is to be engaged with not primarily through dogmatic statements but through a doxologicalorientated life-style. Secondly as the celebration of a thoroughgoing agnosticism that, despite the allusiveness of his thought, we must associate Derrida himself. This reading is equally suspicious of the theological reductionism inherent in modernist thought and of the utilisation of negative theology as a means of recovering theological orthodoxy. Both make the mistake of assuming that we can come into possession of some secure knowledge, whether negative or positive, of God, rather than resigning ourselves to speechlessness in the face of the ultimate mystery of the universe. Thirdly as a disguised atheistic meta-narrative. On this view the failure to envisage the possibility of a positive divine revelation means that our experience of the mystery of the world constitutes nothing more than an idolatrous re£ection of the mindset of the deconstructive philosopher. According to Ingra¤a, `Derrida presents God as an illusion which satis¢es our desire for presence and truth. Di¡erance is not kerygmatic, does not proclaim or call to man, it contains no ``prophetic annunciation'' ' (Ingra¤a 1995: 223). Derrida, like Feuerbach, Freud, Marx and Nietzsche, views God `as the projection of humanity, as an illusory projection in which humanity places and rei¢es all its desires' (223). In this chapter we have identi¢ed a post-modern reading of religion that contrasts strongly with the tradition of anti-realistic a/theology, one that views post-modernity not as an a¤rmation of the power and authority of human creativity but rather as the recovery of a fundamental openness to the mystery of the world. This alternative tradition encourages us to look back at the history of the world's religious traditions and to discover there a religious perspective that ^ whether read as ultimately theistic, agnostic or atheistic in intention ^ points to an ultimate mystery beyond both positive onto-theology and negative apophatic theology, one capable of re/enchanting the disenchanted world of modernity. Both of the post-modern traditions we have looked at ^ a/theology and the theology of re/enchantment ^ claim to save theological discourse from the abuse it su¡ered under the modern regime of onto-theology. Despite their di¡erences, they have in common an assumption that post-modern philosophy has the power and authority to establish the extent and scope of theological discourse. As a result neither addresses seriously the possibility of encountering God's self-revelation. Consequently the task of the next chapter is to explore the impact of postmodernity on those orthodox theologians who, whilst retaining an openness to philosophical questions, nevertheless claim that theological discourse, if it is to retain any legitimacy, must be grounded in divine revelation rather than human philosophy.

Chapter 9

Religious orthodoxy revisited

It is questionable whether any of the post-modern readings of religion considered so far do full justice to traditional expressions of religious belief: mainstream adherents of the main world religions are unlikely to accept the reduction of their religious commitments to an abstract sense of the mystery of the universe, and less likely still to embrace the notion that religion is merely a product of the human imagination. If this is so then there appears to be prima-facie evidence that post-modernity has engendered a series of reductive readings of religion. Hence the need to explore the interface between post-modernity and traditional `orthodox' approaches to religion.

Post-modernity and the world religions Despite their di¡erences, a/theology and the theology of re/enchantment have at least two things in common. The ¢rst is a tendency to operate in the borderlands of speci¢c religious traditions. Though Cupitt's decision to remain an Anglican priest leaves him `fated to be one of the last ecclesial theologians', Taylor's transgression beyond the borders of Christianity clearly identi¢es him as a post-ecclesial thinker (Cupitt 1987: 7). Similarly, though Levinas' thought is deeply rooted in Jewish tradition and Certeau was ordained a Jesuit priest, neither can claim representative status within their respective religious communities. The second is the strategy of seeking to interpret religion through a pre-conceived post-modern frame of thought. The danger here is that the world's religious traditions will be colonised by an alien interpretative framework and e¡ectively forced into the procrustean bed of post-modernity. If post-modern religious thought is to avoid making the same totalitarian mistakes as modern theology it must be willing to listen to the voices of religious orthodoxy. A brief note on the use of the term `orthodoxy' is in order here since, perhaps because of an inappropriate association with forms of religious fundamentalism, it can set alarm bells ringing in the minds of those with liberal sentiments. In the present context the word is used fairly loosely as shorthand for the historical continuity of the mainstream beliefs and practices of

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speci¢c religious traditions. This appropriation of a traditional Christian concept should not be taken to imply either that the world's religious traditions can be legitimately interpreted within the kind of creedal framework developed by Christian theologians; that the problem of identifying a continuity of identity within a religion's historical and geographic diversity is not a substantial one; or that there are no dangers inherent in the over-simplistic attribution of some essential core to any given religious tradition. Nevertheless, in line with the anti-nominalistic stance adopted by critical realism, the following discussion assumes that it is both legitimate and possible to recognise that, despite their multi-faceted and £uid natures, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Sikhism and even Hinduism all possess relatively coherent identities that, for want of a better term, may be labelled `orthodox'. The nature of the interface between post-modernity and the mainstream orthodoxy of the various world religions is a complex one. It is fairly easy to identify super¢cial connections and resemblances. We have already noted links between post-modern alterity and the mystical apophatic traditions of western monotheism. Looking eastwards, commentators have been quick to identify similarities between Buddhist concepts of anatman (non-self ), anitya (impermanence) and sunyata (emptiness), and the deconstruction of modern notions of selfhood (Wernick 1992: 57). Rupert Gethin's exposition of anatman, for example, clearly resonates with post-modern modes of expression: `My sense of self is both logically and emotionally just a label that I impose on these physical and mental phenomena in consequence of their connectedness. In other words, the idea of self as a constant unchanging thing behind the variety of experience is just a product of linguistic usage' (Gethin 1998: 139, my italics). Despite such surface similarities there is a danger of abstracting traditional religious teachings from their original cultural contexts, thereby circumnavigating their rootedness in speci¢c spiritual practices and interpretative frameworks. Any such colonisation by post-modern thought runs the risk of doing violence to the integrity of the world religions by replicating the orientalism that was such a negative feature of modernism's encounter with nonoccidental culture (Said 1978, 1993). Our concern here is to look beyond such super¢cial similarities and engage with some representative theologians who are seeking to respond in various ways to post-modernity on the basis of a primary commitment to the historical continuity of their own religious traditions.

Language, the Shoah and post-Zionist discourse Our examination of orthodox Jewish responses to post-modernism will proceed via two case studies. The ¢rst focuses on the place of theological language in the aftermath of Holocaust; the second is concerned with the possibility of a post-Zionist discourse.

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We begin, then, with Greenberg's suggestion that following the Holocaust `no statement, theological or otherwise, should be made that would not be credible in the presence of burning children' (quoted in Wollaston 1992: 54). The implication of this chilling observation is that the Shoah leads directly to the drying up of speech and the expiration of language. The Jewish recognition of the limitations of our all-too-human language when attempting to speak about God was nurtured in part by the Kabbalist tradition ^ mystical, esoteric, theosophic, gnostic ^ that saw itself as the guardian of that unspeakable knowledge which constitutes the authentic message of the Torah. `For this piety, the Torah is the law of the world, for which all knowledge of the world is hidden in a mysterious way, and the language of which, Hebrew, was already the primal language of creation' (Kung 1992: 176). Such primal language is God's language, God's hidden truth, disguised in the textuality of scripture. Susan Handelmann has identi¢ed connections between such linguistic theology and the post-modern concern for textuality (Handelmann 1982). She relates how traditional Hebraic methods of biblical interpretation, especially rabbinic midrash, use text to illuminate text, constructing an ever-expanding web of marginal commentary that forms a maze of linguistic self-reference. Within this text, she suggests, God is simultaneously hidden and revealed: words acts as simulacra, teasing God in and out of meaning, simultaneously revealing and concealing the divine image/shadow, likeness/ pretence, presence/absence. Following the Shoah God is present only in his absence, speaking only through his silence. Consequently the only proper human response is to reciprocate in kind by refusing to speak. All attempts to do otherwise ultimately come to nothing: neither the language of theodicy that attempts to justify God's ways to humanity, nor the invocation of the ancient Hebrew tradition of lamentation, nor the attempted trial of God that invites `the believer to indict God for His silence in the face of the su¡ering of His Chosen People', is capable of breaking the silence in any legitimate way (Wollaston 1992: 51). Even the witness of the survivors themselves proves inadequate: Primo Levi's attempt to testify to the reality of Auschwitz in The Drowned and the Saved ^ despite constituting one of the indispensable entries in the canon of twentieth-century literature ^ achieved closure only through his self-in£icted death shortly after he completed the manuscript (Levi 1989). Wollaston argues that the Holocaust leads us to the point at which even the basic drive to portray naked reality becomes no more than an emotional luxury, and the true witness of the Muselma«nner ^ the non-men, the drowned, the victims ^ is silenced forever. Jasper adds a Christian voice to this theology of the eclipse of language: Christian re£ection and literature has, by and large, continued to engage in futile, traditional theodical exercises in attempts to extricate itself from the guilt of genocide. More in the spirit of midrash, however,

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the condemned Jew remains within his own text, explaining nothing, endlessly su¡ering yet transcending closure . . . the textuality of experience itself more important than, yet guaranteeing, the absent divinity. Thus in the Divine himself is found the experience of exile, repetition, otherness, inconclusion. ( Jasper 1992: 5f ) Post-modernity reminds orthodox theologians of the limitations of theological discourse, and points them to the example of Job's silence before the absent God of mystery and alterity ( Job 40:3^5). Our second case study of the creative interface between post-modernity and Judaism focuses on Laurence Silberstein's deconstructive reading of Zionism (Silberstein 1996). He begins with the observation that `Zionism has provided both Israeli and American Jews with basic myths, symbols, and rituals that both constitute and give expression to their self-understanding as Jews' (325). The movement o¡ers an ideological grounding for Jewish identity that has rami¢cations both within and beyond Judaism. Its rei¢cation of social, cultural and political power-structures invokes a totalitarianism that e¡ectively silences alternative voices, both within and outside the Jewish community. `Insofar as identity presupposes alterity, any e¡ort by a group to establish the parameters of its own identity entails the exclusion and/or silencing of the voices of Others' (335). Zionism's hegemonic discourse draws on a series of binary opposites that encourage a regime of social and cultural exclusion: homeland/exile, Jew/gentile, secular/religious, etc. Silberstein draws on post-modern cultural criticism, discourse analysis and Foucault's archaeology of knowledge in an attempt to deconstruct the Zionist meta-narrative. When we apply to Zionism the interpretations of discourse and ideology discussed above, we see it not as a closed, coherent, rational system of beliefs, ideas, and practices, but rather a dynamic, con£ictive, discursive system that formulates, generates, disseminates, maintains, and transmits particular identities, forms of social relation and hierarchies of power. (336) The deconstruction of this tradition opens up the possibility of establishing a post-Zionist discourse that can keep faith with orthodox Judaism. Zionism need no longer be approached as a closed discourse which establishes a substantial, essentialised and idealised reality. Instead Silberstein seeks to draw our attention to the movement's fragmented roots and to the potentially open horizons of its future. But does this not lead to the dissolution of Zionist identity in general, and Jewish identity in particular? For Silberstein this question is an inappropriate

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one, framed within modernist modes of thought which are dependent `precisely on those same givens that postmodernism problematizes' (347). He challenges the tendency of `those who raise the question of the erosion of Jewish identity and culture' to `presume the existence of some essential or foundational Jewish identity' (347f ). This `deconstructive analysis of Zionist discourse may be seen as a positive process that has the e¡ect of clearing the space necessary for new and more adequate formulations of Jewish identity and culture' (348). The deconstruction of a Zionism packaged in the essentialist language of modernity opens the door to a reconstruction that is sensitive to the ambiguity of Jewish identity and its responsibility towards the (Palestinian) Other: `to engage in deconstructing the discourse of Zionism in no way precludes one from engaging in activities in behalf of the survival of the Jewish people and its culture' (348). In both these case studies we have observed how those with a core commitment to the integrity of orthodox Judaism have utilised the resources of postmodernity in two ways: negatively as a means of deconstructing the narrow ideologically bound meta-narratives of post-Shoah theodicy and modern Zionism; positively as a means of discovering, in the spaces opened up by such deconstructive readings, a renewed and revitalised understanding of the historical legacy of Judaism.

Post-liberal theology The school of post-liberal Christian theology seeks a creative rea¤rmation of orthodox trinitarian Christianity in the light of post-modern thought (Placher 1997). In broad agreement with critiques of the logo-centric metanarratives of modern theology, post-liberal theologians argue that attempts to engineer an accommodation between Christianity and modernity e¡ectively domesticated the God of Christianity (Placher 1996, Tanner 1988). In particular the failure to di¡erentiate between the authoritarian `God of the philosophers' and the gracious `God of Abraham' resulted in a fundamentally £awed theology. Though post-liberals are happy to welcome postmodern attacks on modern liberal theology, they reject attempts to rewrite the Christian tradition as either an atheistic a/theology or an agnostic theology of re/enchantment on the grounds that neither does justice to the actuality of God's self-revelation as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Hans Frei, in his ground-breaking study of eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury biblical hermeneutics, shows how in the modern era the Bible came to be read within an interpretative framework which assumed that the primary function of biblical language is to o¡er ostensive de¢nitions, either of a set of historical facts or of the religious experiences of the text's authors (Frei 1974: 130). As a result the original theological meaning of the Bible was reduced to a mixture of secular historiography and human psychology. Frei's concern is to recover an understanding of the biblical text as narrative,

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telling the story of God's dealings with the world from the initial act of creation, through the reconciliatory incarnation of Christ in response to the fall, to the ¢nal restoration of all things. This reading strategy, which is closely linked with forms of canonical criticism in which the Bible is interpreted as containing a single uni¢ed narrative rather than an ad hoc collection of divergent stories, has encouraged post-liberal theologians to search for the meaning of the Bible within the text itself, rather than treat the text as a pointer to some extra-textual truth. Post-liberalism is committed to a transformative reading of the biblical narrative through which Christians allow their lives to be taken up and shaped by the sacred story of Christianity, rather than seek to accommodate that story within any alternative ideology, world-view or philosophical system. Modern exegesis, to the detriment of Christianity, has become `a matter of ¢tting the biblical story into another world with another story rather than incorporating that world into the biblical story' (130). The result is a reductive theology accommodated within the framework of modernity, contaminated by the totalitarian drive towards certainty, and infected by an alien meta-narrative predicated on a mixture of pietistic experience and narrowly conceived dogmatic propositions. The recovery of the Bible as realistic narrative ^ a move not to be confused with the historical positivism beloved of fundamentalism ^ reveals a divine story told through a range of literary genres, including, though by no means limited to, crucial historical claims (`cruci¢ed under Pontius Pilate'). To be a Christian is to live a life of faith, hope and charity as part of a community guided by this foundational biblical narrative, rather than seek the immediate self-grati¢cation of some subjective religious experience or the pseudo-security of a rei¢ed doctrinal system. George Lindbeck identi¢es both cognitive^propositional theology and experiential^expressive theology as products of the church's accommodation with modernity, arguing that they e¡ectively reduce Christianity to either the quasi-rationalistic a¤rmation of dogmatic truth or the cultivation of forms of experiential piety (Lindbeck 1984). In their place he proposes a cultural^linguistic model of theological language whose function is to present and preserve the norms, rules, narratives and stories within which Christians seek to live. The various Christian creeds o¡er summaries of the Christian narrative rather than present dogmatic truth claims. The story of God's ongoing engagement with creation is rooted in speci¢c historical acts, and it is a fundamental mistake to idealise and reify this narrative by treating it as a source of abstract universal truths or essential human experiences. Developing Lindbeck's position, Ronald Thiemann argues that Christian revelation is not to be conceived as the disclosure of information about the world unobtainable through ordinary human experience, or as providing an a¡ective source of sacred experience, but rather as `narrated promise' (Thiemann 1985). The Christian narrative recounts the story of God's initiative in seek-

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ing the salvation of his fallen creation, an initiative which invites rather than demands our response. In similar fashion Paul Ricoeur, whose religious thought resonates with many post-liberal themes, has sought to di¡erentiate a `phenomenology of manifestation' from a `hermeneutic of proclamation'. The Christian God does not manifest himself through noumenal spiritual experiences, but rather proclaims his identity through biblical narrative (Ricoeur 1995: 48¡ ). The e¡ect of this shift from dogmatic a¤rmation and pietistic experience to narrated promise is a repositioning of Christian truth claims. If Christians are those who try to live a life shaped by the story of the non-coercive God who calls us to respond to Christ's freely given sacri¢cial death on a cross, then the faithful living out of this story takes precedence over the modernist striving for the security of absolute truth, the worshipping community takes priority over the academic community, right worship assumes ascendancy over right dogma, and orthopraxis replaces orthodoxy. `Theology is a minor practice in the total life of the church' (Hauerwas 1995: 5). Consequently post-liberals are ¢rmly opposed to apologetic attempts to demonstrate the truth of Christianity: humbly living an authentic Christian life takes precedence over engaging in abstract debate about the truth of Christianity with its cultured despisers. Maintaining the distinctiveness of the Christian community separated from the world and taking no interest in re-establishing Christendom, since to do so would be to seek a position of authority in the world that the Christian God refuses, is central to the theological ethics of Stanley Hauerwas. Christians constitute a communitarian body formed and transformed not by spiritual experience or dogmatic propositions but through shared social praxis. `Narrative provides the conceptual means to suggest how the stories of Israel and Jesus are a ``morality'' for the formation of Christian community and character' (Hauerwas 1981: 95). For Hauerwas Christianity embraces a radical ethic rooted not in any universal moral principles or consciousness, but in the community of those who seek to live humbly within the Christian story. Christian identity is formed by those Christian virtues ^ hope, patience, charity, non-violence and so forth ^ that both require and create character. Hauerwas here is deeply in£uenced by both Alistair MacIntyre's Roman Catholic retrieval of a virtue-based ethic and John Howard Yoder's Protestant appeal to the Mennonite ideal of the separated and distinctive religious community (MacIntyre 1985, 1988, Yoder 1972). He is adamant that he is not advocating Christian sectarianism. The church exists to serve the world, but it does so not by grasping for political power, social in£uence and intellectual credibility, but through a self-e¡acing abandonment to the Christian story. As the salt of the earth and the light of the world it seeks to open up possibilities and options for the wider world, not through any aggressive apologetic or intrusive mission, but through the simple witness of obedience to the Christian narrative. `The primary social

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task of the church is to be itself ^ that is, a people who have been formed by a story that provides them with the skills for negotiating the danger of this existence, trusting in God's promise of redemption' (Hauerwas 1981: 10). For Hauerwas non-violence ^ physical, intellectual and emotional ^ is not an abstract principle but a practical possibility opened up by the Christian narrative, a possibility unimaginable apart from the death and resurrection of Christ. There can be little doubt that a primary motivation of post-liberal theology has been to respond to the accusations of totalitarianism put forward by those who reject the exclusive truth claims of Christianity, as well as to the aggressive behaviour of those Christians who embrace Christianity as a form of authoritarian meta-narrative. Because the Christian God reveals himself not as an all-powerful and utterly transcendent despot, but as the all-loving servant of humanity, the modern totalitarian reading of the Christian tradition is shown to be inadequate. Post-liberal theologians draw on the resources of post-modernism to deconstruct distorted and authoritarian forms of Christianity. The space created by this deconstructive strategy allows them to retrieve a form of Christian faith and praxis grounded in the biblical narrative of the cruci¢ed God who, in giving humanity genuine freedom and allowing himself to be displaced to the margins of the world, establishes a liminal community grounded in love of the Other. For post-liberals a Christian meta-narrative conceived in modernist terms is untenable.

Radical orthodoxy The movement of radical orthodoxy emerged from a gathering of theologians in the University of Cambridge in the late 1990s united by a speci¢c, if slightly ambiguous, manifesto (Milbank et al. (eds) 1999, cf. Hemming (ed.) 2000). The movement is self-consciously `orthodox' in its commitment to the absolute sovereignty of the trinitarian God proclaimed by the Christian church. It is self-consciously `radical' in its claim that the only possible source of meaning and security in the world is to be found in the God who reveals himself as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. All human attempts to create meaning and a¤rm salvation, however sincere and well-meaning, are destined to failure; any reading of reality dislocated from its divine source will inevitably be nihilistic. Radical orthodoxy learns from Karl Barth that theology can be nothing more than a fallible human response to the selfrevelation of the God whose Word proclaims a simultaneous message of judgement and grace: judgement because apart from God all human experience, culture and religiosity is ultimately fallen, grace because despite this fact God o¡ers his creation the free gift of undeserved and unbounded reconciliatory love (Ward 1995). Radical orthodoxy embraces the negative thrust of post-modern deconstruction insofar as it challenges the power of human reason, strips away

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human complacency, and exposes the futility of all attempts ^ whether secular or religious ^ to live life without reference to its creator. It also shares with post-modernity a recognition of the ways in which modernity domesticates God by making idols of theological reason, religious experience, sacred scripture and ecclesiastical authority. Not surprisingly, it ¢nds in postmodern a/theology yet one more failed attempt to control God by making him subject to the human imagination, but welcomes the insights of the theologians of re/enchantment because their celebration of mystery opens up the possibility of attending to the revelatory voice of the divine Other. The fundamental problem facing Christianity lies not in the core message of the Gospel, but in the way that message has been corrupted by liberals, radicals and fundamentalists seeking either to justify themselves before God, or to justify the ways of God to humanity. The key text of radical orthodoxy, John Milbank's Theology and Social Theory, attempts a fundamental critique of the `heresy' of secular sociology on the grounds that, like other secular meta-narratives, it attempts to think and construct reality independently of God (Milbank 1993). Milbank's criticism is two-fold. In the ¢rst place secular sociology rei¢es the natural order within which the `laws' of human conduct are assumed to operate, thereby establishing `nature' as the foundational ontological principle, but in doing so fails to o¡er any justi¢cation for this move. Consequently both `modern and postmodern secularisms suspend reality over a void, emptying it of substance and violently cutting it o¡ from any reference to a reconciling transcendent source and goal ^ a God who gifts reality to us' (Shakespeare 2000: 163). In the second place secular sociology does not simply strip away the premodern realm of the sacred to reveal a distinctively modern, profane, reality. Rather it replaces the Christian myth of salvation with an alternative secular myth, one that interprets reality in terms of an unholy mix of a-moral natural law and man-made power-politics, thereby attributing ontological priority to a chaotic and nihilistic violence. Modern thought and politics (most clearly articulated by Nietzsche) assumes that there is only this chaos, which cannot be tamed by an opposing transcendent principle, but can be immanently controlled by subjecting it to rules and giving irresistible power to those rules in the form of market economies and sovereign politics. (Milbank 1993: 5) Both the liberal concern for tolerance and the post-modern advocacy of absolute freedom constitute attempts to police and manage the violence that is assumed to lie at the heart of the order-of-things. For the Christian, however, the incarnation reveals love to be the ¢nal ontological principle of the universe. In the cruci¢xion the violence of the secular world is overcome by divine su¡ering, while the resurrection functions not as some quasi-magical

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proof of God's power over the natural order, but as the a¤rmation of the victory of love over violence. To suggest that God acts as a despot in imposing his arbitrary power on humanity is to interpret Christianity reductively through the lens of a secular ontology of violence, rather than accept its selfunderstanding as being grounded in an ontology of love. According to radical orthodoxy the poverty of the Christian response to the challenge of modernity had the disastrous e¡ect of eclipsing the ontological priority of love. The domestication of the Christian God as the servant of modernity e¡ectively transformed the Christian God of love into an idolatrous deity of power. Viewing God as the source of natural law, the ground of our deepest experiences, the cement of cultural diversity, or the legitimation of human creativity merely underpins the meta-narratives of naturalism, romanticism, liberalism and anti-realism that assume the ontological priority of violence. For Milbank the best way of escaping the pathos of modern theology is to seek to `restore in postmodern terms, the possibility of theology as a metadiscourse' (1). Though it is clear how the strategy of deconstruction assists radical orthodoxy in attacking modern theology, the notion of a postmodern `meta-discourse' appears, at least at ¢rst glance, to be something of a contradiction in terms. However, it quickly becomes clear that Milbank's use of the label demands a distinctively post-modern reading. For radical orthodoxy, faith can no longer lay claim to any rational foundation beyond that of the intrinsic aesthetic beauty, moral attractiveness and spiritual authenticity of the Christian story. The post-modern suspicion of metanarratives brings an end to Christian apologetics, to the strategies of grounding faith in reason, establishing truth through dialogue, or striving to achieve common ground with secularism. Christians can no longer claim the security of possessing direct experience of the divine or authoritative knowledge of God. In a `world made strange' by the loss of the certainties of modernity there is no longer any need to secure faith on rational grounds; instead we are free to simply receive the mysterious gift of God's grace (Milbank 1997a). Such faith is grounded in the socio-cultural practice of membership of the Christian church. It is here, in the midst of a community striving to live out the ontological priority of love, that the truth of Christianity is made manifest. At the heart of Christianity stands doxology: God is known through the communal praxis of praise and worship. `The Christian God can no longer be thought of as a God ¢rst seen, but rather as a God ¢rst prayed to' (Milbank 1997b: 267). Since God is mediated primarily through the liturgical worship of the church, theology constitutes a re£ection on transcendence in the light of the liturgical drama that makes the Christian narrative an actuality for believers. For Catherine Pickstock radical orthodoxy `while conceding, with postmodernism, the indeterminacy of all our knowledge and experience of selfhood . . . construes this shifting £ux as a sign of our depen-

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dency on a transcendent source which ``gives'' all reality as a mystery, rather than as adducing our suspension over the void' (Pickstock 1998: xii). This divine gift is encountered and received in the sacramental worship of the church, hence the startling claim that `the event of transubstantiation in the Eucharist is the condition of possibility for all human meaning' (xv). Just as God, through the perichoresis of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, constitutes the ontological reality of love freely given and freely received, so the church constitutes the heavenly City of God embodied in time, a non-coercive community struggling ^ albeit it with varying degrees of success ^ to embody the virtues of harmony, peace and love (Ward 2000). When it is true to its calling this community will not seek to draw boundaries, argue for its superiority, or impose its truth; instead it will seek to witness to the ontological priority of love, welcoming all that is good in human culture, from whatever source, since all that is good ultimately comes from God. This liminal nomadic community, in living out the ontological priority of love over violence, will witness to the reality that the `insanity of the Cross, the non-sense of sacri¢ce, gift, and excess, express a wisdom which is obscured in the rationalized exchanges of instrumentalized transactions in the mundane world' (Pickstock 1998: 227).

Trinitarian orthodoxy Despite its claim to hold fast to orthodox Christianity the programme of radical orthodoxy has been subjected to a series of sustained attacks from more traditionally minded Christian theologians. Writing as an Anglican priest Steven Shakespeare has drawn attention to `the fundamental parasitism of radical orthodoxy, whose traditionalist formulae are moulded in the image of the postmodernity they try to master ^ much as fundamentalism was the bastard child of secular modernism' (Shakespeare 2000: 165). Roman Catholic theologians have raised concerns about the movement's lack of continuity with the church it claims to serve, as well as its hesitancy in a¤rming the place of reason in theological discourse (Hemming (ed.) 2000). From the Reformed tradition Colin Gunton reads radical orthodoxy's heady brew of patristic theology and post-modern philosophy with reservation: `it must be said that public claims to orthodoxy such as this run the risk of calling attention not to the Lord and his Christ but to the rightness of the believer or the group' (quoted in Kerr 2000: 48). It is clear from this that our attempt to listen to the voices of orthodox theologians as they respond to post-modernity is far from complete. Alongside those theologians who seek to enter into fruitful dialogue with post-modernity must be placed those, such as Colin Gunton, for whom orthodoxy demands a fundamental rejection of postmodernity. According to Gunton there is no neutral site from which we can seek to understand the world: all intellectual enquiry necessarily sets out with a raft

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of prior assumptions and commitments. Christianity is no exception, grounding its world-view in the gracious actions of the God who identi¢es himself, through the Spirit, as the Father of Jesus Christ. The Christian gospel a¤rms ^ contra post-modernity ^ that there is indeed a key with which we can begin to unlock the mystery of the universe, and that ^ contra modernity ^ this key is neither the natural world nor our all-too-human experience, but rather the trinitarian God encountered in the divine economy of creation, reconciliation and sancti¢cation. Since all intellectual activity must be driven by ¢delity to the object of investigation, it follows that Christian theology has no option but to work outwards from its prior knowledge of the actuality of God's saving activity in the world. Given this basic starting point the Christian theologian cannot avoid the fundamental ontological implications of proclaiming a God who is the source of all being: if such a God exists then the universe is ingrained with ultimate meaning and purpose. Further, since this God creates an ordered world and actively seeks to restore a proper relationship between himself and his creatures, it follows that his self-revelation is not shrouded in mystery but accessible to human understanding. Christianity o¡ers concrete answers to fundamental questions about the nature of the world and the meaning and purpose of life, answers that stand or fall according to their ¢delity to the way things actually are in the universe. It follows that trinitarian Christianity embraces a creedal meta-narrative, and as such is fundamentally incompatible with a post-modernity that rejects a priori the possibility of any meta-discourse: `If my story di¡ers from yours at a fundamental level, then at least one of us has things wrong' (Gunton 1995: 51). A theologian presupposing the truth of the Christian Gospel has little choice but to view post-modernity as a godless and ultimately nihilistic economy of human self-a¤rmation. `It is for this reason that the Enlightenment's commitment to universal and objective truth is much to be preferred to the fragmented world of postmodernism, in which there is no reason why we should bother to speak to each other expecting to be understood' (50). Gunton accepts that this preference for the Enlightenment will be dismissed by many as totalising and oppressive, but claims that the problem lies not in the Enlightenment's concern for truth per se, but rather in the supplementary belief that the `concept of truth is something lying within the control of the human rational agent' (21). The Enlightenment's belief that `something eternally and universally true can be founded on human rational and scienti¢c e¡ort alone' is fundamentally mistaken, since eternal truth is founded exclusively in the reality of God (50). Hence the post-modern critique of modernity does not go deep enough: in choosing to attack only the symptoms rather than the root cause of the malaise of the modern age it ¢nds itself adrift in a nihilistic half-world, cut o¡ from any substantial relationship with the ultimate source of creation. It is not the search for truth that is

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totalitarian, merely the assumption that human beings, as the ultimate measure of reality, are able to draw the pursuit of truth to a ¢nal closure. According to Gunton both the narrative theology of post-liberalism and the doxological theology of radical orthodoxy operate in the shadow of Kantianism, ¢ltering revelation through their prior philosophical commitments. As a result they either succumb to post-modern subjectivism ^ we have our doxological experience of God and our narrative of salvation, and you have yours ^ or else proclaim a veiled form of modern human-centred foundational thinking (Gunton 1993: 135 n.6). Though Gunton does not say so directly, if we adopt a charitable position and assume that both postliberalism and radical orthodoxy wish to hold fast to an exclusive and universally valid Christian account of reality, then it is di¤cult to avoid the conclusion that their insistence on disguising such exclusivity behind a veil of post-modern rhetoric is, at best, economical with the truth. If we wish to hold fast to the actuality of the trinitarian God then there is no avoiding the fundamental question as to whether Christian theologians can speak objectively of God, or only subjectively of the believer's shared communal experiences of God, and if the former is the case, how such speech avoids becoming totalitarian. Gunton accepts that theology uses narrative and metaphor to speak of God, but insists that the theologian must account for the relationship between language and the real world. `There can be no evasion of the further question of what follows from the fact that we refer to God and his actions by means of narratives summarised by a number of central metaphors' (Gunton 1988: 46). Gunton follows post-liberal theologians in rejecting the modernist strategy of grounding knowledge in some neutral foundation that presupposes prior insight into the way language ¢ts with reality: it is in the biblical narrative itself that we encounter the primary way of ¢xing reference to God. However, post-liberalism's preoccupation with the literary form of language-as-metaphor runs the risk of making it `appear that we are merely telling stories' (46). The popular equation of metaphor with ¢ction obscures the scienti¢c use of metaphor as a means of telling the truth about the reality of the world, and as a result threatens to undermine the theological task of telling the truth about the actuality of God. The danger facing postliberalism is that its `preoccupation with literary rather than scienti¢c uses of metaphor can lead to a conception of ^ for example ^ biblical metaphors as imaginative expressions of human experience of the world rather than as a means by which we speak about the reality of God' (42). However, contrary to some post-liberal theologians, the recovery of the realistic nature of metaphor and narrative is not the end of the story. The theologian is bound to raise a range of systematic questions concerning the Christian narrative: `Are we justi¢ed in speaking like this?'; `Do the narratives enable us to speak of God directly?'; `What speci¢c truth claims are embodied in the narrative?' `Such systematic questions are imposed on

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the one who would wish to claim that the metaphors tell us the truth about where we really stand in the world' (47). If God genuinely reveals himself in the world, if the biblical narrative does indeed provide a true account of reality, then it must be possible to restate this truth in propositional form and thus make cognitive a¤rmations about God and his dealings with the world. To deny such a possibility, as Lindbeck does in his attack on cognitive^propositional theology, is ultimately to reject revealed religion. Gunton suggests that Lindbeck arti¢cially restricts the nature and task of propositional theology in claiming that `if a doctrine is once true, it is always true, and if it is once false, it is always false' (Gunton 1995: 7, quoting Lindbeck 1984: 16). He challenges this narrow reading of propositional theology on three counts: ¢rst it implies a simplistic one-to-one relationship between language and reality and fails to recognise the rich and variegated way in which propositions engage with the world; second it suggests an intellectualist reduction of salvation to some cognitive `gnosis', when in fact revelation is directed towards the transformation of the whole person; third it assumes that the a¤rmation of doctrinal propositions is necessarily static, rigid and irreversible, thereby ignoring the fact that theological conclusions are always contingent, since the meaning of scripture is, in many respects, always open to question. The integrity of the Christian story demands, contra post-liberalism, that its teaching has `to be given cognitive form if it is to be worthy of belief ' (9). This discussion of Gunton's critique of post-liberalism is but one example of the fact that mainstream orthodox Christian theology ^ Orthodox, Protestant and Roman Catholic ^ remains committed to a¤rming realistic statements about the nature of God and the world and as such seeks to proclaim a propositional meta-narrative that runs against the grain of post-modern thought. This does not, however, entail a descent into totalitarianism ^ for two reasons, one epistemological and the other substantial: the epistemological reason is that, because God can be understood but never fully understood, Christian truth claims retain the status of contingent rationality; the substantial reason is that the God of Christian revelation, far from being the demonic tyrant feared by Descartes, graciously o¡ers all of humanity the gift of unconditional love. The mark of totalitarianism is to be found not in the presence of meta-narratives, but in their material content: hence the Christian ontology of gracious love is less obviously totalitarian than many modern and post-modern alternatives grounded, as they are, on the assumption of an all-pervasive ontology of power. The last four chapters have demonstrated that the religious and theological fall-out from the challenge of post-modernity is complex, variegated and bound up in the a¤rmation of a series of truth claims. Wittgenstein, in the Philosophical Investigations, draws attention to the fact that all attempts at explanation ultimately arrive at some form of closure: `If I have exhausted

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the justi¢cations I have reached bed-rock, and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say ``This is simply what I do'' ' (Wittgenstein 1968: 85). For modernity this bed-rock is either the brute fact of the natural world or the sovereignty of human reason; for post-modernity it is either the denial of objective reality, or the a¤rmation of the ultimate mystery of life; for monotheism it is the actuality of God. In a very real sense each of these options constitutes a meta-narrative of sorts, in some cases explicitly stated, in others merely implied. There are at least four di¡erent stories to be told concerning the interface between theology and post-modernity. First that of Cupitt and Taylor, whose a/theology a¤rms a non-realistic God and ¢nds its bedrock in the human imagination. Second that of Derrida and Levinas, whose theology of re/enchantment a¤rms a God-of-mystery and ¢nds its bed-rock in the thoroughgoing alterity of the order-of-things. Third those theological advocates of post-liberalism and radical orthodoxy who, in their desire to balance the demands of theological orthodoxy and post-modernism, embrace a hybrid God who reveals himself, but does so in such a manner that such revelation remains permanently shrouded in mystery. Fourth those such as Gunton whose a¤rmation of theological orthodoxy leads them to reject out of hand the entire legacy of post-modernity. Such a diversity of response suggests that the implications of post-modernity for education are likely to be complex; hence it is to the interface between education and postmodernity that we must now turn our attention.

Part III

Education

Chapter 10

Modern pedagogy

Having dealt with the philosophical and religious dimensions of postmodernity it is time to turn our attention to educational issues. One way of unpacking the post-modern critique of modern education would be to follow Foucault and develop an archaeology of the power-structures inherent in institutionalised schooling; alternatively we could draw on Derrida and o¡er a critique of the logo-centrism of modern curricula dependent on forms of techno-rationality. Rather than follow either of these routes we will instead examine the impact of the three core meta-narratives of modernity ^ naturalism, romanticism and liberalism ^ on modern pedagogy.

The project of modern education If education in Europe during the middle ages was largely under the control of the church, the dawn of the modern era saw the nation state increasingly taking on the burden of responsibility. It is di¤cult to reconcile the ensuing tensions between secular and religious approaches to education. The Christian understanding of education operated within the framework of a theological economy of salvation unacceptable to most secular liberals. According to Christian teaching the possibility of humanity achieving its divinely appointed goal lies wholly in the grace of God; it is not something that can be achieved by human e¡ort. As Peter Gay points out, even `the most optimistic Christian was not free to assert that education, no matter how thoroughgoing, could ever erase the e¡ects of Adam's Fall' (Gay 1973b: 511). However, the modern shift from a God-centred to a human-centred universe, in which humanity established itself as the measure of reality and took responsibility for its own destiny, challenged this Christian view. Where previously Saint Paul had taught that `all have sinned and lack God's glory', so now Rousseau proclaimed the new gospel of modernity: `the ¢rst impulses of nature are always right; there is no original sin in the human heart' (Romans 3:23, Rousseau 1974: 56). The modern belief in humankind's original innocence `persuasively testi¢ed to the e¤cacy of education in man's renewal . . . to believe in the importance of education was to believe, at least

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implicitly, in its power' (Gay 1973b: 511). Education, not religion, was to emancipate `the whole of humanity from ignorance, poverty, backwardness and despotism' by producing enlightened citizens capable of mastering their own destiny (Lyotard 1992: 97). This assertion of the e¤cacy of education was accompanied by a shift in thinking about educational aims. For Christianity the ¢nal goal of education lay in the reuniting of fallen humanity with its creator, a goal that was essentially eschatological: though this end could be pre¢gured, at least in part, in this present life it was necessary to look beyond the grave for its ¢nal consummation. The citizens of modernity, lacking the proverbial patience of the saints, were unwilling to wait so long: the politics for social reform required an early harvesting of the fruits of education. Hence John Locke's thoroughly eudemonistic and pragmatic educational philosophy, designed to establish the good life here and now. According to Locke the task of education was to enable young bourgeoisie gentlemen to prepare to enter adult society and serve their country according to their station in life. Locke's Christian faith, shaped as it was by his latitudinarian suspicion of theological dogma and religious enthusiasm, proved £exible enough to sidestep the eschatological dimension of more traditionally minded theologies of education. `By stressing the ethics of Jesus and the consonance of Christianity with reason' Locke sought to by-pass theological concerns in favour of an essentially humanistic pedagogy (Latourette 1975: 983). Having identi¢ed education as a potentially powerful instrument of social regeneration the next challenge facing modernity was to transform this vision into reality. Here problems began to emerge. Aspiring to have the courage to use one's own reason, and having the necessary understanding and skill so to do, are two very di¡erent things. Gay suggests that modern pedagogy was unable to prevent the emergence of a signi¢cant rift between the Enlightenment's rhetoric of freedom and a rich vein of paternalism running through its educational provision. The philosophers of the Enlightenment, in attempting to reconcile the urgent need for social reform with the ideal of freedom, found themselves faced with a `dilemma of heroic proportions' (Gay 1973b: 497). The immediate needs of society could not a¡ord to wait for the next generation to learn to think for itself, and as a result educators began to impose social change rather than empower citizens to take decisions for themselves. Faced `with the overpowering presence of the illiterate masses and the absence of the habit of autonomy, freedom and reform were often incompatible' (497). Gay continues: the road to the realisation of the philosopher's political programme thus led through the devious and embarrassing detours of repression and manipulation that were a denial and mockery of the world they hoped to bring into being: the very methods used to distribute the fruits of

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enlightenment seemed to be calculated to frustrate the Enlightenment itself. (497) Central to the post-modern critique of modern education is the charge that teaching and learning are inseparable from the power-structures endemic within society. According to Foucault `there is no point in dreaming of a time when knowledge will cease to depend on power; this is just a way of reviving humanism in a utopian guise' (Foucault 1980: 52). This postmodern critique is more fundamental than Gay's claim that modernity failed to turn its pedagogic vision into reality: the core problem with modern education is that its vision is fatally £awed. The theory and practice of modern education is dependent on the foundational meta-narratives of naturalism, romanticism and liberalism: deconstruct these and the entire edi¢ce collapses. Once modernity's basic trust in the objectivity of the natural sciences, the authenticity of subjective experience and the intrinsic value of the twin liberal principles of freedom and tolerance is undermined then modern education is left without any support or justi¢cation. The deconstruction of the meta-narratives of modernity leads to the collapse of modern educational discourse, and ultimately to the disintegration of the concept of `education'. `If there is really no such thing as education then all the discussions of rationality, autonomy and ``worthwhile activities'' undertaken by mid- and late-twentieth-century philosophers of education were entirely misconceived, and were perhaps politically partial and culturally biased' (Blake et al. 1998: 2). Hence the inevitable conclusion that the project of modern education faces a fundamental assault from post-modern philosophy.

Classical education and the pursuit of knowledge One of the great achievements of the Enlightenment was the remarkable growth of our knowledge of the natural world. The success of modern science, when coupled with heightened expectations regarding the potential e¤cacy of schooling as a force for good in the world, opened up the possibility of consolidating pre-modern approaches to education grounded in the pursuit of knowledge. Paul Hirst, one of the most in£uential twentieth-century advocates of this option, proposed an education `based fairly and squarely on the nature of knowledge itself ' (Hirst 1965: 11). As a philosopher of education operating within the British tradition of linguistic analysis Hirst set out to unpack the idea of `education' and other cognate terms, seeking thereby to clarify `the meanings of educational beliefs and principles by . . . mapping the concepts they employed' (Hirst 1982: 7). Hirst's analysis led him to identify the heart of education as the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. This, he believed, opened up the possibility of an objective grounding of

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education uncontaminated by the arbitrary whims of subjective experience and cultural relativism. This appeal to objective knowledge enabled Hirst, together with his colleague Richard Peters, to counter the primitive notions of education they discerned in the `traditional' and `progressive' pedagogies that had come to dominate modern educational practice. Traditionalism, in seeking merely to enculturate children into the prevailing norms of society, relied on authoritarian methods of teaching in which `the most desirable form of response on the part of the learner is the unquestioning acceptance of doctrines' (Hirst and Peters 1970: 29). Pupils were not encouraged to think for themselves, since obedience was valued above independence of mind: `scienti¢c laws and facts were taught rather then the critical attitudes and ways of thinking of a scientist; moral conformity was insisted upon, but not moral awareness' (32). Progressive child-centred education, on the other hand, reacted against traditionalism by seeking to free children to discover their innate potential for creativity and autonomy. However, progressive teachers failed to appreciate that such virtues are vacuous unless people are provided with the forms of knowledge and experience to be critical, creative and autonomous with. People have to be trained to think critically; it is not some dormant seed that £owers naturally . . . being critical must be distinguished from being merely contra-suggestible, just as being `creative' must be distinguished from mere self expression. (31f ) Given the Enlightenment's desire to encourage people to think for themselves, Hirst viewed the debates between progressivism and traditionalism as largely anachronistic. Both fail to pay su¤cient attention to public forms of knowledge and as a result descend into subjectivism and relativism. If education is to transcend the local and ephemeral it must allow itself to be driven by the pursuit of objective knowledge: better a restless striving after truth than a contented acceptance of illusion. Hirst insists that the pursuit of knowledge cannot be separated from questions of social and personal development. By placing knowledge at the heart of education he is claiming that human £ourishing is dependent on individuals-in-community establishing appropriate relations with the ultimate order-of-things. This vision of education is closely connected with the premodern notion of paideia, which identi¢ed the pursuit of truth with the cultivation of character ( Jaeger 1961, 1965). According to Plato the good life is intimately bound up with our knowledge of, and authentic relationship with, the transcendent forms: education must bring us from darkness into light by guiding us from the cave of ignorance into the open spaces of truth. Similarly in the Judaeo-Christian tradition salvation is dependent upon our knowledge

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of, and authentic relationship with, God: education, guided by the grace of God, must strive to draw us away from sin and ignorance into a salvi¢c knowledge of the creator of all things. If education as paideia is to retain its integrity it must avoid both the sophistry that prefers the immediacy of rhetorical persuasion to the long-haul struggle for truth, and the idolatry that exchanges the truth of God for a lie and worships and serves created things rather than the Creator (Romans 1:25). This classical conception of education was able to thrive because for both Plato and the early Christians reality was essentially teleological, possessing an inherent meaning and purpose of direct existential concern to humanity. The advent of modernity, however, brought with it a naturalistic metanarrative committed to the concept of a value-free cosmos devoid of any ultimate teleological goal. As modern science learnt to describe the universe through the neutral language of mathematics and geometry, so the motion of the planets came to be understood in terms of their spatio-temporal relationships, rather than their association with the ultimate meaning and purpose of the order-of-things. Hence Newton was able `to bring mathematical order into phenomena, and so expound the immutable laws of nature in terms of the causal and mechanical connections that constitute the system of the world' (Torrance 1980: 24). As a result the teleology of a morally, aesthetically and spiritually meaningful universe gave way to the purposeless in¢nity of space and time. This divorce of the natural world from all considerations of aesthetic, moral and spiritual value constituted a direct challenge to classical approaches to education driven by a primary concern for knowledge and truth. If the `real' world is no more than a random collection of atoms interacting in accordance with mechanistic and deterministic laws, then education grounded in the pursuit of scienti¢c knowledge will be severely reduced in scope and increasingly dependent on behaviourist accounts of human action and motivation. Hence the decision of traditionalist and progressive educators to discard the pursuit of knowledge in favour of value systems that, though lacking any necessary connection with the ultimate order-of-things, did at least enjoy the virtue of embracing values considered fundamental to the well being of humanity. It is clear that if Hirst's attempt to rehabilitate a classical knowledge-based education was to succeed he needed to ¢nd ways of countering the reduction of knowledge to the sum of the brute facts of the natural world, and of challenging the strategy of supplementing such knowledge with subjective values devoid of any ontological foundation. In philosophical terms he needed a rich epistemology capable of transcending the limitations of positivistic forms of empiricism and romanticised versions of idealism. Turning his back on the historical options of Platonism and Judaeo-Christian theology, Hirst claimed it was possible to identify a cluster of `forms of knowledge' capable of connecting the mind with objective reality in a manner that avoided

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subjectivity yet retained a ¢rm hold on questions of value. Hirst's identi¢cation of these forms varies. In 1970, for example, he lists seven: formal logic and mathematics; the physical sciences; an awareness and understanding of our own and other people's minds; moral judgements; objective aesthetic experience; religious claims; and philosophical understanding (Hirst and Peters 1970: 62¡ ). Each is constituted by linguistic practices that re£ect the various ways in which human experience has become organised and structured around accepted public symbols: the individual forms embody distinctive conceptual vocabularies and logical structures that have been subjected to progressive testing and development in the light of the demands of external reality. Hirst attempts to avoid the reductive tendencies of modern approaches to knowledge by positing a dialogical relationship between mind and reality: `the achievement of knowledge is necessarily the development of mind ^ that is, the self-conscious rational mind of man ^ in its most fundamental aspect' (Hirst 1965: 123). He considers the synergetic relationship between individuals-in-community and the external world as pivotal for any understanding of reality: `men are able to come to understand both the external world and their own private states of mind in common ways, sharing the same conceptual schema by learning to use symbols in the same manner' (123). Thus our knowledge of the realm of morality is grounded in a shared public discourse that is capable of transforming personal identity on the basis, not of any private subjective preference, but of a public and hence objective understanding of the nature and demands of morality. For O'Connor Hirst's position is vague, unscienti¢c and essentially pragmatic: his attempt to justify the objective status of our value judgements fails because he cannot show how they are open to refutation; further, his failure to provide a coherent account of the ontological relationship between the realms of fact and value means that there are no good reasons for rejecting the naturalistic view of knowledge as simply the product of a neutral description of the material world (O'Connor 1972). Hindess suggests that Hirst's treatment of the language of value is incoherent because it fails to distinguish between contingent reality and logical necessity. The statements which Hirst makes about the nature of mind, the structure of experience and the forms of knowledge are both synthetic and necessary; that is, they are contingent because they give information about the world and because they can be denied without selfcontradiction but they are also known to be true with as much certainty as tautologies. (Hindess 1972: 172f ) Faced with such criticisms the rejection of the position adopted by Hirst and his followers in the 1970s was emphatic. White's comments are represen-

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tative of a broad consensus: `seductive though the argument may be at ¢rst sight, it is pretty clearly inadequate on closer inspection . . . there is no need to rake over these dead leaves again' (White 1982: 10f ). Hirst himself acknowledges, in retrospect, that his programme `mistakenly saw itself as producing objective universal truths' (Hirst 1982: 8). He goes on, however, to suggest that the widespread criticisms made of his position do not `constitute the fundamental challenge to the enterprise that is sometimes claimed' (8). It is, he believes, possible to restate his position by presenting `more sophisticated arguments in claims about universal categories', and `developing greater sensitivity to the social contexts of conceptual use' (8). Hirst here appears to be moving in the direction of a contingent rationality oriented towards the ongoing pursuit, rather than secure possession, of objective knowledge. This option receives some support from Scarlett, who distinguishes between formal and teleological aspects of Hirst's position: where his formalism seeks to ground knowledge in some timeless logic, his teleology looks toward the progressive development of knowledge (Scarlett 1984). This opens up the possibility of an education aware of the contingent and provisional nature of our understanding of the world, yet committed to the intrinsic value of the ongoing pursuit of knowledge. In summary we can say that the failure of a classical knowledge-driven education to £ourish in the modern world was due largely to naturalism's reduction of knowledge to a materialistic reading of the natural world. Educators were faced with the dilemma that any pedagogy grounded in such knowledge would be devoid of moral, aesthetic and spiritual value and lacking in any teleological concern for the ultimate meaning and purpose of life. If the strength of Hirst's position lay in its attempt to respond to this challenge by seeking to establish a richer understanding of the nature and scope of knowledge, its weakness lay in its failure to transcend the modern polarity of empiricism and idealism and establish a critical epistemology capable of synthesising the realms of fact and value into a greater whole. This is an issue we will return to later, when we consider the relationship between critical realism and education. Here we must content ourselves with the observation that, since the modernist reduction of knowledge to the sum of empirically veri¢able facts made a pedagogy grounded in the pursuit of such knowledge extremely di¤cult to sustain, modern education found itself increasingly drawn towards the very models of education Hirst set his face against, viz. traditionalism and progressivism.

Traditionalist education and the common good It is time to turn our attention to the relationship between the meta-narrative of liberalism and traditionalist forms of education concerned to induct children into the prevailing norms of society. As we have already seen, liberalism was concerned primarily with the practical task of ordering a society divided

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between the singularity of scienti¢c fact and the plurality of a range of potentially con£icting value systems. In the liberal scheme of things social harmony was to be achieved by activating the twin principles of freedom of belief and tolerance of the beliefs of others. The urgent need to stabilise a potentially anarchic society, coupled with a strong belief in the e¤cacy of education, resulted in the emergence of a form of education designed to transmit liberal values to pupils. In adopting this agenda liberal educators e¡ectively replaced the pursuit of knowledge with the facilitation of social harmony: issues of moral utility took precedence over ontological questions of ultimate truth. The key ¢gure in the initial development of modern liberal education was John Locke. His Thoughts Concerning Education, ¢rst published in 1693, consists of a series of letters to Edward Clarke o¡ering him advice on the upbringing of his son (Locke 2000). Though these occasional pieces were never intended for publication, and despite the fact that they contain no systematic philosophy of education, they have nevertheless had a deep impact on liberal educators. The Thoughts are rooted in the distinction between certain knowledge and contingent belief that was a central feature of Locke's empirical epistemology. As Bantock observes, they reveal a `tension between his humanistic views of conduct and manners and his new ``scienti¢c'' conception of understanding and utility' (Bantock 1980: 245f ). Locke set out to `lay down the Measures and Boundaries between Faith and Reason' in the belief that the previous lack of such a demarcation point `may possibly have been the cause, if not of great Disorders, yet at least of great Disputes, and perhaps Mistakes in the World' (Locke 1975: 688). In doing so he gives voice to the liberal view that the roots of the fanaticism and totalitarianism that continue to poison the project of modernity lie in our propensity to act on contingent beliefs as if they enjoyed the status of universal knowledge. Though the principle of freedom of belief is fundamental, it is clear that such freedom must have its limits if fanaticism is to be prevented from dragging society down into a state of depravity. Locke identi¢es two necessary restrictions on our freedom to believe and act as we like. In the ¢rst place, though our beliefs will inevitably transcend the boundaries of knowledge they must not be allowed to come into direct con£ict with reason. Secondly beliefs may be held only if they do not threaten the stability of society. The principle of freedom carries with it the responsibility of toleration, but there is no need to tolerate unreasonable beliefs that threaten the fabric of society. What form might an education rooted in these liberal principles take? Clearly to seek to impart ephemeral beliefs as if they enjoyed the status of concrete knowledge would be tantamount to indoctrination, an option that would serve only to undermine the cherished principle of personal freedom. The option of a critical education designed to enable pupils to engage intelligently with a range of con£icting belief systems was never given serious consideration: Locke never manages to free himself from the assumption that

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to teach is necessarily to advocate. Instead at the heart of liberal education stands the notion that the precise content of a person's beliefs is less important than the manner in which they are held. The primary task is the formation of young adults capable of making the abstract principles of freedom and tolerance a practical reality in their lives. The pedagogic focus shifts from the transmission of knowledge to the cultivation of character. The primary responsibility of the teacher is the pragmatic one of preparing the young bourgeois gentleman for the good life of public service through the inculcation of virtue, wisdom, breeding and learning: `a Sound Mind in a Sound Body, is a short, but full Description of a Happy State in this World' (Locke 2000: 83). In company with the vast majority of Enlightenment educators Locke rejects the doctrine of original sin. Since education possesses the power to transform on its own terms there is no need to invoke a higher divine power: `of all the Men we meet with, Nine Parts of Ten are what they are, Good or Evil, useful or not, by their Education' (83). The challenge facing the teacher is to transform pupils in a manner that, ultimately at least, respects their freedom: if the liberal virtues are dependent upon the possession of self-discipline, then such discipline must ¢rst be instilled by the teacher. Hence Locke's pedagogy is rooted in a benign behaviourist psychology that takes moderation as its watchword. Though reward and punishment are central to the learning process, personal motivation must ultimately be rooted in a happy disposition rather than slavish obedience. By inculcating self-discipline in children, and inducting them into the moral norms and etiquette of society, the virtues of civility, liberality, courage, love of justice and humanitarianism will be established as an integral part of their characters. As pupils gradually gain self-mastery and learn to discipline themselves, so the authority of the tutor may be progressively relaxed. If liberal education is concerned primarily with the formation of character rather than the transmission of knowledge, where does this leave the material content of the curriculum? As Chambliss points out, there is little in the Thoughts `that meets the criterion either of intuitive knowledge or demonstrable knowledge' (Chambliss 1976: 376). Locke certainly expected children to acquire a mastery of the basic skills of reading, writing and grammar, and to submit themselves to the disciplines of geography, mathematics, geometry, history, law and religion. However, the material content of the curriculum is of value not for any intrinsic reason, but on the one hand because it contains knowledge and skills important for the future vocation of the student, and on the other because academic study constitutes a means of instilling selfdiscipline. The impact of liberal education has been considerable. The English and Welsh Education Reform Act of 1988, for example, embodies much of Locke's educational vision. According to this legislation schools have a primary responsibility to promote `the spiritual, moral, cultural, mental and physical

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development of pupils' and to prepare them for the `opportunities, responsibilities and experiences of adult life' (UK Government 1988: 1). The focus here is two-fold: on the formation of character and preparation for adult life. Despite the fact that the legislation also introduced, for the ¢rst time, a compulsory national curriculum, there is no direct mention of the place of knowledge in the statement of educational aims. The assumption appears to be that knowledge is not to be pursued as an end in itself but rather for its pragmatic utility, an observation con¢rmed by the political stress on the importance of schools cultivating the techno-rational skills and aptitudes necessary if the next generation of school leavers is to contribute e¡ectively to the economic well being of society. At the heart of liberal education is a concern for the harmonious well being of society. If an open plural society is to £ourish then education must produce the next generation of citizens capable of contributing altruistically to the common good. This requires a basic education oriented towards the cultivation of a virtuous character, supplemented by a more speci¢c commitment to the vocationally driven transmission of knowledge and skills. The Enlightenment ideal of individuals having the courage to think for themselves is thus recast as the liberal ideal of individuals thinking for themselves within the con¢nes and constraints of a non-negotiable liberal order. Hence, despite the rhetoric of freedom and the insistence that pupils must be taught to take responsibility for their own lives, the failure to equip children to engage intelligently in the pursuit of knowledge oriented towards fundamental questions of ultimate truth reveals liberal education to be inherently conservative, grounded in the task of inducting students into the prevailing norms of liberal culture.

Progressive education and personal development So far in this chapter we have explored how two of our core modern metanarratives have impacted on modern educational theory: the struggle of naturalism to establish a pedagogy rooted ¢rmly in the pursuit of knowledge, and the attempts of liberalism to cultivate the virtues of freedom and tolerance. Romanticism, the third of our modern meta-narratives, found fault with both these pedagogies: the fundamental problem with naturalism was that its understanding of knowledge was so dislocated from questions of value as to be morally, aesthetically and spiritually redundant; the fundamental problem of a liberal education blind to non-liberal ways of being in the world, was that its induction of children into the prevailing norms of liberal society seriously undermined individual freedom. Romanticism, with its core concern for the unique experiential integrity of each child, sought to forge an alternative, self-consciously counter-cultural, form of child-centred education. The fruits of romantic educational theory are to be found in the

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progressive education that dominated much mainstream western education in the 1960s and early 1970s, in experiments with radical methods of schooling such as that which continues to be conducted at Summerhill School, and in the thinking of those who sought to bring about the wholesale de-schooling of society (Illich 1996, Neill 1990). The ancestry of such progressivism can be traced back to the key ¢gure in the development of romantic educational theory: Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau's relationship with the mainstream philosophers of the Enlightenment was an ambiguous one: despite sharing their commitment to reason, freedom and the emancipatory potential of education, he departed from them on two key issues. The ¢rst of these was an insistence on the importance of creativity, imagination and the emotions that set him apart from the frequently sterile rationalism of the Enlightenment. His understanding of `natural reason', whilst attempting to combine both sense and sensibility, nevertheless gave priority to the latter: `to exist is to feel; our feeling is undoubtedly earlier than our intelligence, and we had feelings before we had ideas' (Rousseau 1974: 253). As Grimsley observes, for Rousseau `the philosophical aspects of the physical universe as the ordered system of a divine Creator are far less important than the spontaneous response of human sensibility to its spiritual essence' (Grimsley 1973: 74). In sharp contrast to the deistic invocation of God as merely the ¢rst principle of the rational order inherent in the universe, Rousseau experiences `a feeling of gratitude and thankfulness to the author of my species, and this feeling calls forth my ¢rst homage to the bene¢cent Godhead' (Rousseau 1974: 240). His God is ultimately a mystery beyond human understanding: `the more I struggle to envisage his in¢nite essence the less do I comprehend it; but it is and that is enough for me; the less I understand, the more I adore' (249). Not surprisingly a naturalistic philosophy that brackets out all considerations of value and con¢nes itself to the task exploring the sum of factual knowledge of the physical world was totally unacceptable to Rousseau. Rousseau's second major dispute with Enlightenment philosophers focused on their celebration of the bene¢ts of civilisation. Though he repudiated the Christian doctrine of original sin, he did not believe this provided any reason for being optimistic about the human predicament. `Time and again Rousseau published a work that used the intellectual resources of the philosophes, only to conclude that the social world was too corrupt to reform' (Hulliung 2001: 58). Though `everything is good as it comes from the hands of the Maker of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man' (Rousseau 1974: 5, following the translation of Bowen 1981: 187). Since the corrosive nature of society alienates us from our original natural goodness, it follows that vice is rooted in our conformity to the authority of societal expectations. No wonder, then, that Rousseau has little time for any understanding of education as induction into the prevailing norms of society. Though he

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agrees with Locke that education must be concerned with moral formation, he grounds such formation in natural goodness rather than civic virtue. `In e¡ect ``natural goodness'' constitutes simply the rallying point for the disengagement from the traditional culture thought necessary by the Enlightenment . . . a reason for abstraction from current social pressures' (Bantock 1980: 282). As Bowen observes, all of Rousseau's writings `concentrate on a single theme, the utopian desire to reconstruct society by means of a new theory of natural order' (Bowen 1981: 186). Where Locke viewed the child's mind as a tabula rasa waiting to be inscribed with the received wisdom of society, Rousseau believed that children are born with the innate capacity to develop freely and naturally into fully rounded adults. Hence the role of education is not to ¢ll the mind with alienating knowledge but to preserve the child's primal innocence. The task of the teacher is to act, not as a postman delivering pre-packaged bundles of information, but as a gardener responsible for creating the organic conditions necessary for the child's innate potential to £ourish and £ower. We are all born with an in-built natural goodness, but this quickly becomes contaminated whenever society, driven by hubris and pride, departs from the natural order. However, when properly cultivated and guided by conscience, natural reason will maintain a pristine relationship with the natural order. Hence education for Rousseau is primarily a negative process whose fundamental responsibility lies `not in teaching virtue or truth, but in preserving the heart from vice and from the spirit of error' (Rousseau 1974: 57). Darling identi¢es three core principles at work in Rousseau's programme of negative education: unlimited scope for play, freedom to learn through stimulus appropriate to the child's natural being, and the avoidance of formal instruction and direct teaching (Darling 1985). It is clear that Rousseau's child-centred education is dependent upon the ontological assumption, central to the romantic meta-narrative, that all children are gifted with natural goodness. Without this ontological underpinning a progressive education content simply to leave children in limbo, entirely reliant on their own resources, would appear to be morally dubious and intellectually vacuous in its systematic avoidance of pedagogical responsibility. As Bantock points out, without a viable equation of the `natural' with the `good' progressive forms of education entail the pedagogical abdication of value by default (Bantock 1980: 282). In e¡ect Rousseau's romanticism provides the Enlightenment's core virtue of absolute freedom with an ontological foundation, but in doing so it makes progressive education reliant on the prior acknowledgement of a speci¢c set of metaphysical assumptions. The conclusion is di¤cult to avoid: despite its rhetorical commitment to the absolute freedom of the child, progressive education amounts to little more than a positive induction into, and transmission of, the romantic metanarrative that serves as a mirror-image of Enlightenment rationalism.

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Underlying this child-centred pedagogy lies a paternalism just as vigorous as that encountered in our discussion of Locke's liberal pedagogy. Progressivism's freedom is no more than the freedom to conform to the ideology of romanticism: `What is fostered is an alternative culture stimulated by the indirect intervention of the tutor' (274). Even Rousseau, in his occasional unguarded moment, accepts the accuracy of this criticism: it is true I allow him [his pupil Emile] a show of freedom, but he was never more completely under control, because he obeys of his own free will. So long as I could get the mastery over his will, I retained control over his person; I never left him for one moment. Now I sometimes leave him to himself because I control him continually. (Rousseau 1974: 298) As Darling puts matters, `the rhetoric of reform associated with child-centred education disguises the way in which this philosophy reinforces an essentially conservative conception of education' (Darling 1985: 31). He goes on to quote, with approval, Schapio's observation that `what starts out as an assertion of human liberation becomes turned back on itself as a means of further repression or accommodation' (31, cf. Schapio 1984: 377). This chapter set out to paint a picture of the impact of the meta-narratives of modernity on educational thought. We began by observing how the Enlightenment's rejection of the Christian doctrine of original sin opened up the path to a dynamic view of education as a powerful tool for personal and social transformation. The meta-narrative of naturalism, insofar as it stressed the discovery of objective knowledge, enjoyed an a¤nity with classical approaches to education committed to the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. However, naturalism's reduction of knowledge to the ¢ndings of the natural sciences proved incapable of attending to the broader value-driven educational needs of society, and Hirst's attempt to solve his dilemma by enlarging the scope of knowledge failed, by and large, to convince. We then saw how liberalism responded to the shortcomings of such a knowledgedriven education by recasting education as the cultivation of character in the service of the greater good of society. Here a commitment to a knowledgebased curriculum gave way to a concern to inculcate the key liberal values of freedom and tolerance: provided education could help make these values a practical reality the issue of the material content of our optional and privatised beliefs became a pedagogic irrelevance. Finally we saw how progressive education, drawing on the meta-narrative of romanticism, sought to emancipate children from the limitations of naturalistic and liberal approaches to education by cultivating the innate goodness of the child. Though each of our three core meta-narratives impacts on education in di¡erent ways, they

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have in common a tendency to recast education within the framework of their prior metaphysical commitments. This opens up the fundamental question of the extent to which modern education is vulnerable to the post-modern critique levelled at modern culture as a whole, viz. that behind the rhetoric of freedom and emancipation lies a network of totalitarian power-structures. Hence it is to the post-modern critique of modern education that we must now turn.

Chapter 11

Post/pedagogy

This chapter opens with an outline of post-modern attempts to deconstruct the edi¢ce of modern education. Though there is broad agreement amongst post-modern thinkers about the need for such deconstruction, opinions are divided over the shape of any subsequent post-modern pedagogy. The second part of the chapter will begin to address this issue by outlining proposals, tabled by anti-realistic educators, for a `post/pedagogy' committed to the task of enabling students to engage playfully in the exploration of a range of alternative life-style options. We will reserve our criticism of this antirealistic pedagogy for the next chapter, where it will form a bridge to an exploration of the approach to education advocated by the post-modern philosophy of alterity and di¡erence.

Deconstructing modern education `Historically, education can be seen as the vehicle by which modernity's ``grand narratives'', the Enlightenment ideals of critical reason, individual freedom, progress and benevolent change, are substantiated and realised' (Usher and Edwards 1994: 2). By drawing on the meta-narratives of naturalism, romanticism and liberalism modern education seeks to ground its discursive practices in scienti¢c knowledge, the developing identity of the learner, and the political economy of liberalism. However, this synergy between pedagogy and meta-narrative leaves the project of modern education extremely vulnerable: undermine its ontological and epistemological foundations and the entire edi¢ce will inevitably begin to crumble. According to post-modern philosophers the deconstruction of logo-centric rationality, coupled with the claim that onto-theological questions of ultimate truth are illegitimate, forces the inevitable conclusion that knowledge is ephemeral, personal identity illusory and liberal values redundant. As Usher and Edwards point out, since knowledge-based, traditionalist and progressive forms of education `share some of the central epistemological, metaphysical and humanistic assumptions of modernity', they have no choice but to `veil themselves in foundations and absolutes in order to hide their partiality

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and their implication with the operation of power' (26). Removing this veil reveals the true nature of modern education: despite its attempts to ground itself in the objectivity of the natural world, in an essentialist account of human nature, and in a binding social contract, it is exposed as nothing more than a subjective, self-perpetuating and entirely arbitrary regime of power. The post-modern assault on knowledge-based education is made considerably more e¡ective courtesy of the fact that, from the outset, modern pedagogy cultivated within itself the seeds of its own destruction. As we observed in the previous chapter, the unity of classical education ^ that is to say, an education in which the pursuit of knowledge drives the pedagogical struggle to facilitate personal and social development ^ is predicated on the assumption that reality itself is saturated with meaning and purpose. Hence one of the basic tenets of classical pedagogy is that personal and social development must be assessed in the light of the ultimate teleology of the universe, whether this is understood with reference to God, the Platonic forms, the natural world, human essence or some other bed-rock reality. The core task of classical knowledge-based education is to enable individuals-in-society to establish an authentic relationship with the ultimate order-of-things. It is the existence of tensions inherent within modernity itself that has torn the unity of classical knowledge-based education apart. The naturalistic dislocation of knowledge from all considerations of moral, aesthetic and spiritual value makes it impossible to assess the authenticity of personal and social development with reference to the ultimate meaning and purpose of the order-of-things. This leaves modern education attempting to juggle between three apparently unconnected ontological principles: the brute fact of the material world, a romanticised ontology of selfhood, and a liberal political economy grounded in some form of social contract. The failure to provide a uni¢ed account of the relationship between these three foundational principles leaves modern knowledge-based education in a state of crisis. Its inability to demonstrate any substantial relationship between scienti¢c knowledge and questions of moral, aesthetic and spiritual value leads to the suspicion that its pedagogic practices are rooted in the exercise of arbitrary authority. Education, that is to say, is exposed as the site of an ongoing power struggle. This being the case, post-modernity can point to the poverty of modern education's reliance on subjective values as a prime source of its inevitable demise. Arguing from a post-modern perspective, Cleo Cherryholmes identi¢es school textbooks as a key instrument through which modern education wields arbitrary power under the guise of a benevolent and non-coercive transmission of objective knowledge. `Textbooks can be thought of as a collection of statements that make authoritative knowledge claims. They make statements about subject matter, social values and arrangements, what counts as knowledge, and what information is more or less important' (Cherryholmes 1988: 51).

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He goes on to argue that the use of textbooks as a tool for transmitting linguistic meaning is predicated on two key assumptions. The ¢rst of these is the tendency `to approach meaning structurally, with meanings presented by de¢nitions, referents and lineages' (55). Understanding is established on the basis of rei¢ed vocabulary presented in the form of narrow dictionarystyle de¢nitions, the underlying supposition being that individual words are able to label reality in a direct and unproblematic manner. This creates the illusion that our knowledge of the world is both transparent and accessible. `When teachers instruct students, it may not be far o¡ the mark to suggest that many believe the meaning of what they say is contained in some sort of correspondence with the way things are' (53). The second assumption is that textbooks `advance meanings . . . that represent the current stage of ``authoritative knowledge'' ' (55). The suggestion here is that, given the deeply problematic nature of our knowledge of the world, any attempt to present children with authoritative knowledge will inevitably end up arbitrarily privileging one perspective over another. Cherryholmes goes on to argue that such textbook knowledge must be regarded as redundant: `Derrida shows the structure, coherence, stability of meaning, and centeredness of textbooks to be a ¢ction' (61). The material content of the modern school curriculum is reliant on logo-centric forms of thought that have been decisively undermined by the deconstructive strategies of grafting, erasure, intertextual reading and the presence of trace and di¡erence. A number of conclusions can be drawn from this: that the traditional subject disciplines constitute ¢ctional constructions whose relationship with the `real' world is at best ambiguous; that the supposition that textbooks o¡er access to a single authoritative reading of their subject matter is no longer sustainable; and that education itself, when grounded in the pursuit of knowledge, is nothing more than an empty charade. As Cherryholmes observes, students and teachers are unlikely `to ask how meanings came to be what they are if textbooks do not self-consciously draw attention to the social construction and context dependency of meanings' (55). Their failure to do so denies students access to a rich post-modern pedagogy capable of uncovering `multiple messages and voices in the text as the reader moves back and forth from himself or herself to what is written' (67). One of the key motivating factors driving the modern search for knowledge was the concern to bring order and stability to the world. According to the philosophers of the Enlightenment civilisation faced the very real threat of a nihilistic descent into chaos unless it could ¢nd ways of establishing secure knowledge and thereby seize control of its destiny. Hence modern education is grounded a knowledge-driven concern to secure humanity's place in the universe by mastering and controlling the physical, social and psychological environments. Generally speaking modern educators do not see this equation of knowledge and power as a particularly contentious move, since it is assumed that the objectivity of knowledge can act as a check on any potential

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abuse of power. However, the deconstruction of such knowledge leaves modern education open to the charge of complicity in illegitimate economies of power. Attempts to bring order to society, once dislocated from objective knowledge of reality, can be guided only by subjective considerations and as such are reliant on the wielding of power rather than the discovery of truth. It is clear, from a post-modern perspective at least, that curriculum construction and selection, when carried out with reference to the various academic disciplines, can no longer claim justi¢cation on the grounds that the resulting pedagogy provides students with access to objective knowledge about themselves and the world they inhabit. On the contrary, knowledgebased programmes of learning constitute nothing more than a series of arti¢cial constructions of reality, constructions whose legitimacy rests entirely on the prior decisions of those responsible for selecting from a relativistic pool of conventional knowledge. Since knowledge is socially constructed its place in the curriculum is not due to its inherent truth, but to the arbitrary authority of those with the power to make decisions as to what should count as knowledge for our children. Hence, despite the outward appearance of freedom, modern knowledge-based education is viewed by its post-modern critics as at best benignly paternalistic, at worst authoritarian and dictatorial. Can the same be said for progressive child-centred approaches to education inspired by the meta-narrative of romanticism? In answering this question it is important to begin by reminding ourselves that the claim that knowledge is deeply implicated in economies of power is not exclusive to post-modernity. The romantic reaction against the dry rationalism of the Enlightenment, as exempli¢ed especially in Rousseau's child-centred pedagogy, identi¢ed the transmission of knowledge as a key instrument of social control long before the emergence of post-modernity. The romantic `turn-tothe-self ' constituted an attempt to protect children from the harmful in£uence of a society content to use education as a means of forcing them into subservience to some arbitrary notion of the common good. There is a clear family resemblance between the post-modern pedagogy of deconstruction and the romantic project of progressive education. Both view society as a corrupting in£uence on the child's development: the former on the grounds that it injects a restrictive logo-centric construction of reality into the curriculum, the latter in the belief that it curtails the child's freedom for natural growth. Progressive education, as we have seen, seeks to protect children from the unedifying in£uence of society through a negative pedagogy designed to arti¢cially withdraw them from the world, thereby freeing them to turn inwards and discover their own essential natures. It is at this point, however, that the family resemblance between progressive and post-modern pedagogy begins to break down. For the post-modern educator the suggestion that children possess an essential nature which education has a responsibility to cultivate and nurture constitutes yet another modern meta-narrative ripe for deconstruction.

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Derrida's Of Grammatology draws attention to the inconsistency of Rousseau's insistence on the original innocence of children (Derrida 1976: 141¡ ). The basic problem for Derrida is that Rousseau reaches his conclusions from a position already contaminated by the `fall' of society, and as a result we have no reason to suppose that his argument is not similarly infected. In addition, advocates of negative education are incorrect in assuming that it is actually possible to separate children at an early age from all cultural contacts and in£uences. Rousseau ¢ghts ¢re with ¢re, setting culture against culture in the misguided belief that it is thereby possible to transcend culture, and in doing so constructs an idealised picture of natural selfhood that is ultimately dependent on the cultural conventions of romanticism. Post-modernity deconstructs the idealised picture of human nature by proclaiming the death of the subject and rejecting the notion that we possess any innate essence that teachers have a responsibility to identify, preserve and bring to maturity. We have already seen how Kristeva and Bataille contribute to this post-modern rejection of romanticism by developing strategies designed to free individuals from the tyranny of their own subjectivity. From this vantage point it becomes clear that what Rousseau actually achieves is the construction of an education discourse that, despite its rhetorical commitment to freedom, actually imposes what Foucault refers to as a `technology of selfhood' onto children. The technique of negative education invites pupils to `e¡ect by their own means or with the help of others a number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct and ways of being' in order to construct their identities in conformity with the expectations of humanistic psychology (Foucault 1988: 14). The attempt by modern society to master individuals through various forms of persuasion and control is e¡ectively interiorised: students are taught how to take responsibility for their own self-surveillance and self-control. The notion of an essential identity is not something that is naturally inherent in pupils, rather it is imposed from outside, and as such constitutes a further move in the pedagogical power struggle for control of the hearts and minds of children. Despite its rhetoric claims to emancipate pupils from a repressive society, progressive education is no more than a child-centred gloss on the socialising agenda adopted by traditionalist forms of education. Liberal education's concern to bring harmony to a diverse and potentially unstable society joins knowledge-based and child-centred education as a target of post-modern critique. Here the focus falls on the rei¢cation of liberalism into a closed and potentially repressive world-view, a move that constitutes a signi¢cant departure from the utilisation of the principles of freedom and tolerance as the basis of an interim ethic designed to establish the conditions for the ongoing search for truth. This in turn shifts the task of education from the pursuit of truth to the policing of the boundary markers that help identify liberal polity. Schooling becomes a means of preserving social harmony in a pluralistic society through the regulation, surveillance

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and policing of children's adherence to the non-negotiable dogmas of liberalism. Intolerance of those who break the rules ^ for example by insisting that religious beliefs cannot be con¢ned to the private sphere but, on the contrary, must guide and direct every aspect of life ^ engenders a political correctness that demands worship at the altar of liberalism, and subjects those who choose not to do so to corrective forms of education. The freedom espoused by liberal education is no more than the freedom to be liberal, and the principle of tolerance is extended only to those willing to adopt liberal norms and values. The central thrust of the post-modern attack is clear: modern education is inextricably bound to economies of power, and attempts to limit, transcend or neutralise such power by appealing to the ontological bed-rock of scienti¢c knowledge, human nature and the liberal virtues fail because each in turn is shown to be rooted in relativistic and subjectivist assumptions that, when treated as if they constituted secure universal knowledge, quickly become paternalistic, authoritarian and eventually totalitarian. Deconstruct objective knowledge and education is left with nothing else but the subjectivity of raw power. Ultimately modern education is happy to collude with such power-structures on the assumption that the imposition of order on society is preferable to the alternative of a descent into anarchy and chaos. Postmodernity, with its stated preference for anarchic freedom over totalitarian repression, sees the exposure of the power-structures of modernity as an essential ¢rst stage in the construction of any alternative post-modern pedagogy.

Constructing post-modern education At the centre of post-modern educational thought is the desire to resist, subvert and deconstruct modern approaches to the theory and practice of education. Our analysis of this negative strategy inevitably raises the question of the positive content of post-modern pedagogy: how might a post-modern pedagogy be constructed once the forces of deconstruction have completed their work? Usher and Edwards urge caution here, suggesting that we should not expect post-modernism to provide us with `a new de¢nitive perspective from which a new set of prescriptions and techniques for organising teaching and learning can be generated' (Usher and Edwards 1994: 28). Given that `the postmodern critique of grand narratives renders ``blue prints'' for change problematic' it follows that `a refusal of totalising explanations must necessarily involve a refusal of totalising conclusions' (207). There is however a danger that, in striving to avoid identifying speci¢c educational programmes because post-modern educators regard them as anathema, we allow ourselves to become overly cautious. Despite the risks of misrepresenting the post-modern position it is surely reasonable to ask questions about the nature and purpose of post-modern pedagogy, about the ways in which post-modern schools and colleges might seek to organise them-

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selves, and about the activities and interactions we might expect to encounter in post-modern classrooms, lecture theatres and seminar rooms. Is there any positive content, however implicit, ironic or unintended, behind what ^ on the surface at least ^ appears to be the deliberately evasive rhetoric of postmodern educators? These questions bring us back to the fundamental issue of the nature of post-modernity itself: are we to understand it as a paradigm shift into a closed anti-realistic world-view, or as an open critical voice operating at the margins of modernity to call our attention to the voices of alterity, otherness and di¡erence? If the former, then there must, presumably, be some kind of positive educational strategy designed to uphold the basic tenets of anti-realism, even if this constitutes nothing more than the wholesale de-schooling of society. If the latter, then we might expect the critique of modernity from within to at least attempt to yield some concrete changes in modernist policy and praxis. It follows that, though there is a need for caution in addressing the issue, we are nevertheless justi¢ed in asking what is the positive content of post-modern educational thought.

The contours of post/pedagogy The rest of this chapter will outline a `post/pedagogy' closely linked to the stream of post-modern philosophy associated with the hyper-realism of Baudrillard and the a/theology of Cupitt and Taylor, a pedagogy that views education as a tool for buttressing an emergent anti-realistic world-order. What, then, may legitimately be said about the nature of post/pedagogy? The traces of an answer are perhaps most clearly discernible in the postmodern debate surrounding the future of higher education. This is at least in part because universities, though clearly subject to the same modernising forces of surveillance, inspection and accountability as schools, nevertheless retain signi¢cantly higher levels of autonomy and as a consequence ¢nd themselves more receptive to post-modern forms of thought. This autonomy manifests itself especially in the freedom to construct and develop the curriculum since, unlike many schools, the contemporary university does not tend to have a modernist national curriculum imposed from above. At the same time universities are increasingly exposed to the market forces of late capitalism and, as a result, are compelled to ¢nd ways of e¡ectively recruiting and retaining students in order to survive. It is the freedom to control the curriculum that provides university departments with a powerful tool through which to attract students and achieve ¢nancial security. Faced with the need to adapt to a rapidly changing economic and cultural environment some academics are turning to post-modernity for inspiration. University teachers committed to the ideals of post-modernity ¢nd themselves ^ in some institutions at least ^ relatively free to construct courses on the basis of the perceived needs and interests of potential students, rather than on the basis of the integrity of their specialist subject disciplines. The

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resulting synergy between post-modern ideology and the market forces of consumer capitalism establishes an economy in which universities may be tempted to `transform themselves, or allow themselves to be transformed, into either instrumental agencies for training potential employees in transferable skills or environments for the exploration of alternative lifestyles for virtual sociocultural realities' (Filmer 1997: 57). One potential consequence of the decision to replace the pursuit of knowledge with the needs and expectations of students as the core criteria of curriculum development is that universities grow to be `so diverse, so fractured and di¡erentiated that it may . . . become absurd to seek to express any grand organisational principle' (Smith and Webster 1997: 3). At the same time the `constantly reiterated defence of the university in terms of its usefulness to government and industry' suggests that higher education may become increasingly `resigned to a pre-set agenda which is narrowly instrumental' (4). This attention to student desire and political aspiration challenges the traditional raison d'eªtre of the university as a bastion of academic excellence committed to the pursuit of knowledge through disciplined research and scholarship. The strategy of adapting to the immediate demands of students and society, rather than holding fast to the historical integrity of their original mission, is re£ected in Zygmunt Baumann's argument that universities can no longer seek legitimacy simply by appealing to the past: times change, and if they are to survive in the post-modern world they must learn to become even more di¡use and diverse (Baumann 1997). According to Krishan Kumar, if universities are `only about the communication of knowledge or the transmission of imperishable values, then it is di¤cult to see how they could defend themselves against the charge of being expensive anachronisms' (Kumar 1997: 28). However, it is `still possible to defend them as the sites of cultural exploration and engagement' (31). Kumar proposes that universities adopt the unique role of bringing together a rich diversity of talented individuals and providing them with an appropriate milieu in which to £ourish. Their primary task should be to provide `breathing spaces in life's course', thereby enabling students `to do things and to re£ect on things for which for the rest of their lives they will have neither the time nor the opportunity' (29). Since students learn more from each other than they do from the formal academic curriculum the extracurricular life of the university should be seen as its main justi¢cation. Degrees should be given simply for participation in a speci¢c form of cultural and social life. Though Kumar does not say as much, his vision suggests that attendance at university should constitute an extension of the increasingly popular gap year, itself a modern version of the grand tour that, during the Enlightenment, was regarded as the culmination and completion of formal schooling. Apparently public funding of a three-year cultural sabbatical is less of an expensive anachronism than the three-year academic hard graft required to earn a degree.

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Kumar's position has a¤nities with the understanding of `graduateness' advocated by Philip Brown and Richard Scase. They argue that the traditional model of students entering the job market as career-seeking bureaucrats is no longer a viable one. In our post-modern world `graduates have to be more ``£exible'' in their attitudes towards work and more ``adaptive'' in their behaviour in the labour market' (Brown and Scase 1997: 86). Since the complexity and £uidity of the job market demand a high degree of £exibility, students should attend university with the basic aim of establishing a portfolio of transferable skills. Universities must seek to create `charismatic' rather than `bureaucratic' personalities: `the idea of the charismatic personality is one which values those who seek to break the structures of routine actions and rule-following, to replace them with patterns of innovation and creative behaviour' (89). To be a citizen of post-modernity is to learn to experience the world in new and di¡erent ways by engaging with, and immersing oneself in, its cultural images. In doing so it is important to recognise that such images do not directly represent the world, but are simply constructs that £ow from a variety of discursive practices. Experiential learning, due to its celebration of diversity and respect for the unique and ever-changing identities of individual students, provides an appropriate means of achieving this end. `In this context, experiential learning both as a theory and as a set of practices provides a nexus for understanding the shift from the cultivation of teleological and grounded reason to the cultivation of open-ended and unsuppressable desire' (196). The various perspectives on post/pedagogy encountered in this discussion of higher education have a number of themes in common. In the ¢rst place it is clear that post/pedagogy parallels modern education in its inability to work with a classical notion of education in which the pursuit of knowledge, personal development and the good of society are woven into a seamless whole. Since it is no longer possible to consider education in terms of the pursuit or transmission of knowledge post/pedagogy has little option but to concern itself with personal development and the public good. Secondly, by drawing on an anti-realistic meta-narrative post/pedagogy views education for personal development as a process of cultivating desire for its own sake: the task of the university is to provide students with a range of cultural experiences rather than a structured curriculum, not in order to cultivate any essential identity, but as a means of stimulating students' ability to play freely in the post-modern cultural playground. Thirdly, education for the good of society is limited to the task of vocational preparation: such preparation is rooted in character formation rather than professional training, speci¢cally the formation of £exible and adaptable personalities capable of functioning e¡ectively within an ever-changing post-modern marketplace. The pedagogical aims of the post-modern educator appear to be achieved whenever students are stimulated to prepare to take their place as e¡ective

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citizens within a desire-driven post-modern cultural and political order: such learning has everything to do with life-style choice but little, if anything, to do with the pursuit of knowledge.

A manifesto for anti-realistic education The elements likely to play a central role in any non-realistic pedagogy, as these were identi¢ed in the previous section, are clearly visible in the programmatic defence of post/pedagogy o¡ered by Stuart Parker. His Re£ective Teaching in the Postmodern World attempts, as the subtitle makes clear, to map out a systematic `manifesto for education in postmodernity' (Parker 1997). Though presumably the label `manifesto' ^ with its suggestive promise of a systematic programme ^ is intended to be read ironically, there is no getting away from the fact that Parker o¡ers a clearly structured vision of an approach to education grounded in an anti-realistic world-view. Parker's argument proceeds on the basis of an unambiguously non-realistic metaphysic. We inhabit `a world that is made not found, a world in which there is no truth that we have not put there, no reason except for the rules we live by, no deep signi¢cance that is not super¢cial' (140). All knowledge, values and beliefs are created by the free play of communal language and as such cannot claim purchase on any more substantial reality. It follows that we are free to discard the inhibitions, conventions and metaphysical baggage of outmoded realistic accounts of reality in favour of the ironic, playful and increasingly fashionable rhetoric of post-modern relativism. Parker's antirealism seeks to establish a space for `multiple approaches to creating ways of seeing the world, of constructing new seeings-as-if, of designing styles of living' (149). Since those committed to the vocabulary of modernism `will be unable to see the signi¢cance of what we are talking about' he sees no point in arguing his case with them, preferring instead simply to laugh `at the silliness of the emperor in his new clothes' (145f ). `Postmodernist irony provides the appropriate stance ^ and therapeutic vocabulary ^ with which to ridicule the pu¡ed up, vulgar gestures of this stylistic grotesque and to begin to treat it with appropriate disdain' (146). Not content merely to critique modernity, Parker's anti-realistic brand of post-structuralism seeks to blaze a trail into a brave new post-modern world-order. Turning his attention to educational theory, Parker o¡ers a fairly standard critique of what he terms `positivistic' and `techno-rationalistic' approaches to teaching. His key concern, however, is to undermine forms of critical pedagogy that claim to o¡er a viable alternative to the worst excesses of modern education, whilst at the same time retaining faith in the claim that freedom and justice can be pursued through the application of reason. He argues that critical teaching committed to emancipation and social justice requires `some general theory of equality', yet in the wake of deconstruction `that is precisely what cannot be written' (142). Any model of education grounded

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in re£ective teaching, action research or critical theory must be deconstructed because it is `insu¤ciently divorced from the traditions it rejects for it to be capable of expressing the things it feels or realizing its declared emancipatory purpose' (5). Parker here is claiming to understand critical educators better than they understand themselves, arguing ^ on the assumption that a non-realistic pedagogy o¡ers the only viable alternative to modern educational theory ^ that advocates of critical re£ective practice fail to recognise that they are defending `a maturing philosophy on the way to becoming properly postmodern' (139). In other words critical educators have yet to fully recognise the fact that the only alternative to the modernist project is an anti-realistic post/pedagogy: modernity cannot be retrieved by reconstructing it within the framework of critical realism. Since in a post-modern age the task of schooling can no longer be to impart knowledge, it follows that the curriculum ^ at least as traditionally conceived ^ must be abolished. `Postmodern schools will jettison the model of knowledge which curriculum carries: universally respectable categories of belief and opinion; necessarily worthwhile pursuits independent of situation or local interest; absolute and invariant stepping stones to citizenship and maturity' (151). Instead schools must seek to create a post-modern society by establishing the cultural space within which students are free to enact a variety of life-style choices. `Postmodern education nurtures communities who will create their own style, decide what they want to learn, what practices will characterise their schools, how their teachers will be educated, what standards their children will be judged by, what their literary setting will be' (159). Teachers will need to draw on values that are local and ephemeral rather than universal and absolute, the criteria of curriculum selection being that of the potential of a topic to stimulate the emergence of post-modern sensibility. In contrast to their modernist counterparts, students of post-modernity `will have a more assertive, robust, creative disposition written into them through their education' (148). Negatively this will involve the cultivation of an ironic attitude towards knowledge: the post-modern pupil will be one `who lives the deconstructive manoeuvres which enable her to see no truth as necessary, no truth as necessary, all truth as created, contingent and transiently enshrined in the role of permanence within some currently fashionable text-style' (150). Positively pupils will develop the con¢dence and imagination to make creative life-style choices. Learning will take place in educational fashion houses designed to open up a multiplicity of life-style options, each `o¡ering the potential for an endless plurality of statements through their cultural and aesthetic currency, their intertextuality and their susceptibility to re-inscription under new stylistic gestures or novel iconographies' (149). The only criteria for a child's selection between the various life-styles on o¡er will be that of personal preference, inclination and desire. The outcome of such a post-critical aesthetic education `will not be describable through a

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determinate catalogue of competencies or achievements but will instead be what we might prefer to call a cultivated, literate and ironic human being; a citizen of postmodernity' (152). The task of the teacher is not to demonstrate but to persuade. Such persuasion will proceed via `extravagant leaps' and `cavalier gestures' resting `on nothing more solid than the hope that she or he might entrance through the sheer £ourish of style' (146). Formal rational teaching will be replaced by a rhetorical `hodgepodge of manoeuvres and dirty tricks which might become gold if an audience falls for them' (146). This does not mean that teachers must be life-style experts committed to the task of imposing a speci¢c stylistic identity on the children they teach. On the contrary, `there are no experts because the title is fatuous in a world where style is created not found, where what is good is permanently up for grabs' (151). Instead teachers will encourage students to participate, on their own terms, in the task of creating their identities of choice. They will `not worry about truth, about reasoning within normal limits, for they are interested in seeing how far these limits can be distorted, corrupted, turned inside out, in articulating new style, new taste' (157). Parker refuses to o¡er any intellectual justi¢cation of his manifesto on the grounds that, in the post-modern context where rhetoric has replaced rationality, the only appropriate defence is one rooted in questions of taste rather than reason. We should adopt a post-modern pedagogy of desire simply because we ¢nd it more tasteful than the vulgar system of modern education it seeks to replace. The problem with modern educational bureaucrats is that their `ignorance', `arrogance' and `swaggering self-importance' is simply bad mannered, and `bad manners are not to be cured by formal, rational argument but by providing the vocabulary appropriate to the context within which good manners become identical with the reasonable thing to do' (144). Parker's recognition of what he terms the potential `malevolent payo¡ of postmodernism' leads him to pay a little more attention to the question of the moral justi¢cation of his position (154). He acknowledges that what `worries people about postmodern relativism is that among the disparate contexts, religions, customs, interests, sexual proclivities etc. lurk such monsters as human sacri¢ce, cannibalism, child pornography, Nazism' (154). However, such concerns fail to di¡erentiate post-modern relativism from liberal tolerance. Because post-modernists are not liberals their celebration of di¡erence does not require a universal toleration of every life-style choice. Though it is impossible for relativists to eliminate various unpalatable discourses operating on the fringes of post-modernity, it is nevertheless possible to rule them out. `Postmodernists are not debarred from saying that the artefact of Nazism is wrong; but it is wrong because it o¡ends our literary taste and not because ethical reality itself is o¡ended' (154). The logic of Parker's position would seem to be that the child's unconstrained selection from a range of life-style choices must ultimately be subservient to the teacher's

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imposition of an appropriate level of good taste, and presumably only those teachers who share Parker's taste should be allowed into the classroom. At ¢rst glance such an arbitrary imposition of good taste and life-style choice carries with it disturbingly authoritarian overtones. The only viable alternative, within the framework of Parker's manifesto, would appear to accept the possibility that some children may demonstrate a taste for such things as violence, racism and homophobia, and that in such a situation the teacher's only recourse is to point out that his or her preferred tastes are di¡erent. This is clearly a deeply radical programme which, if adopted, would transform western education beyond recognition. We will reserve our critique of Parker's position for the next chapter, where it will form a bridge to a discussion of a post-modern pedagogy rooted in the post-modern philosophy of di¡erence. We began this chapter by noting some of the ways in which the deconstructive techniques of post-modernity have been brought to bear on modern educational theory. It was suggested that modern approaches to education are dependent on the foundations provided by the modern meta-narratives of naturalism, romanticism and liberalism. Once these foundations are destroyed the entire edi¢ce of modern education inevitably collapses. If there is no such thing as reliable knowledge, if human beings lack any stable identity, and if the liberal virtues of freedom and tolerance are essentially authoritarian, then an education designed to transmit knowledge, nurture selfhood and cultivate virtue is reduced to an economy of raw power. Turning our attention to anti-realistic forms of education we considered the debate on the future of university education and Parker's anti-realistic education manifesto, noting how the pedagogical task is reduced to the process of stimulating desire as a means of enabling students to integrate themselves in a postmodern order dominated by the principle of absolute freedom. The question as to whether such a pedagogy is desirable, justi¢able or sustainable will be picked up in the next chapter.

Chapter 12

Border pedagogy

The previous chapter outlined post-modern strategies for deconstructing modern education and explored attempts to ¢ll the resulting vacuum with an anti-realistic post/pedagogy. The present chapter opens with a critique of post/pedagogy, charging it with being both incoherent and unsustainable. This leads into an examination of the educational possibilities opened up by the post-modern philosophy of alterity: it is suggested that a `border pedagogy' grounded in a concern for the Other has a signi¢cant role to play in contemporary attempts to re-envisage education in the wake of the demise of the project of modernity.

Deconstructing post/pedagogy We have presented Stuart Parker's post/pedagogy of desire as a typical example of post-modern pedagogy operating within an anti-realistic paradigm. Our criticism of Parker's position begins by highlighting its underlying epistemological and metaphysical commitments, many of which are open to question: it is by no means clear that reality is made rather than found; that language is unable to establish any lasting purchase on the order-of-things; that the free-for-all of unbridled desire is the only e¡ective way of combating the repressive power-structures of society; and that only those with privileged insight are able to appreciate the real signi¢cance of anti-realism. Despite claiming to have escaped the strictures of logo-centrism, Parker's metaphysical and epistemological assumptions have a number of clear a¤nities with modernist modes of thought, in particular the mind-set of logical positivism. In the ¢rst place Parker follows the positivists in allowing Kant to impose the interpretative framework within which epistemological questions are appropriated. Positivism responded to the Kantian distinction between the world-in-itself and the world-we-perceive by introducing the principle of veri¢cation as a means of distinguishing between factual statements that somehow lock on to the real world as it truly is, and statements that ^ because they cannot be veri¢ed ^ must be presumed to £oat free of reality and are consequently dismissed as emotively generated nonsense. Working out from

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precisely the same starting point Parker makes two moves that distinguish his position from that of the positivists: on the one hand he deconstructs the principle of veri¢cation as a vestige of logo-centric thought, while on the other he ¢nds in unveri¢able language not nonsensical emotivism, but rather a rich source of sign and symbol with which to construct his preferred ¢ctional identity. Parker and the positivists are united in assuming a fundamental rift between the world of fact and the realm of value; they di¡er only in their choice as to which of these has a signi¢cant bearing on the human condition. Signi¢cantly Parker shows no interest in alternative epistemological frameworks, in particular the view propounded by critical realists that, since our knowledge proceeds from the fact that we indwell reality, epistemology is not dependent on the Kantian question as to the extent to which language is, or is not, able to provide a bridge between ourselves and the world. Secondly positivism, in insisting that the external world must conform to our ability to perceive it, e¡ectively gave a procrustean-like priority to epistemology over ontology: the fact that we can only know for certain that which can be veri¢ed through our senses draws the conclusion that reality can only consist of that which we are able to verify. Parker follows a similar line of reasoning, moving from the epistemological premiss that we are unable to make contact with any substantial reality to the ontological conclusion that no such reality actually exists. Thirdly Parker also shares with the logical positivists a lack of intellectual curiosity concerning the possibility that there may actually be more to the world than their respective philosophical systems are able to comprehend. Faced with a plurality of contrasting and contradictory interpretations of reality both Parker and the positivists choose to foreclose the pursuit of truth. Where positivism a¤rms a singular positivistic metaphysic, Parker resigns himself to the singular ideology of absolute relativism. Neither approaches the tensions inherent in cultural pluralism as a spur to actively participate in the struggle to persuade the world to yield up more of its hidden secrets. Fourthly Parker follows the positivists in embracing Descartes' concern for epistemological certainty. Though they arrive at very di¡erent conclusions, one claiming to have established secure knowledge and the other insisting that knowledge in any shape or form is unobtainable, both insist that their positions are true and hold them with a tenacity grounded in the Cartesian equation of truth with certainty. Neither addresses the possibility that knowledge may be partial, provisional and contingent, and yet still remain knowledge. The fact that we engage with reality in a multitude of complex ways, that on occasions we simply get things wrong, that we can be guilty of overstating the claims we make, and that our conclusions are always open to critical review, revision and amendment, does not warrant the simplistic conclusion that the only valid knowledge is certain knowledge. We constantly

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¢nd ourselves exploring the borderlands between knowledge and belief, understanding and confusion, clarity and mystery. This ought to fuel our intellectual curiosity and drive us to redouble our e¡orts to make greater sense of reality, rather than placidly turning our backs on the pursuit of knowledge. Fifthly both Parker and the positivists, as a consequence of their leadenfooted abdication of intellectual responsibility, end up advocating a range of curiously stilted and wooden truth claims. Positivism, classically, insists that the discourse of morality, aesthetics and theology is quite literally meaningless. In similar vein Parker ¢nds himself claiming that scienti¢c language is unable to engage meaningfully with the material world, that moral condemnation of (say) the abduction and murder of children is no more than an expression of personal taste, and that the literary critic is driven by the `belief that ultimately he will be able to di¡erentiate good literature from bad through the application of a mathematical algorithm' (Parker 1997: 155). The cumulative e¡ect of these arguments is clear: though Parker claims to have emancipated himself from modern logo-centrism his thought remains embroiled with, and dependent upon, the very tradition he seeks to distance himself from. Though his anti-realistic conclusions may be very di¡erent from those of the logical positivists, they share a remarkably similar interpretative framework. Parker insists that the only alternative to a post/pedagogy of desire is the imposition of some form of authoritarian education system. In order to sustain this position he must be able to demonstrate that critical forms of education, despite their claims to be able to empower students to identify and counter ideological power-structures, are inherently dictatorial. Parker develops his position by suggesting, as we have already noted, that a critical education concerned to emancipate pupils by focusing on the concept of equality must ¢rst establish a clear understanding of the meaning of the term. Since, however, the concept has been e¡ectively deconstructed by post-modern philosophy, such understanding is no longer available to the teacher. If schools choose to turn a blind eye to this fact they will end up embracing some arbitrary de¢nition of equality that, once introduced into the curriculum, will lead directly to oppressive forms of teaching. Two observations need to be made here. The ¢rst is that it is not clear that an education for equality requires its ultimate goal to be securely ¢xed in advance. Generally speaking we engage in intellectual activities precisely because we are seeking answers to that which we do not already know; if its results were known in advance science would be a redundant activity. There is no obvious reason why this should not also be the case in the ¢eld of education. Engaging in an exploration of equality in the classroom does not require any prior agreement as to the precise meaning of the term: on the contrary, an education sensitive to the diverse ways in which the term is used

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is likely to provide a far richer learning experience than one predisposed to a single monolithic meaning. The second observation to be made is that, having argued in favour of the emancipatory power of post/pedagogy on the grounds that it rejects any pre-set goals, Parker immediately contradicts himself by identifying a clear pedagogical aim for his own educational programme, namely the cultivation of desire freed from any external constraint. In doing so he adopts a speci¢c understanding of the nature of both desire and emancipation: desire is understood simply as a striving for selfsatisfaction rather than, for example, Levinas' understanding of desire as the drive to attend to the voice of the Other; similarly emancipation is understood as `freedom-from' all external constraint, rather than any alternative such as `freedom-for' appropriate and responsible relationships. It is di¤cult to see why an education that sets out to o¡er pupils access to a critically informed understanding of the plurality of ways in which equality and freedom may be interpreted must be branded totalitarian, while one that insists on imposing a narrowly conceived monolithic reading of both desire and freedom should be deemed immune from such criticism. It appears, then, not only that Parker is dependent on logo-centric forms of thought, but also that at crucial points his argument is self-contradictory. On the basis of what has been said so far it is not clear that critical education constitutes a totalising narrative, nor that Parker has managed to avoid constructing his own oppressive power discourse. Given that neutrality is impossible, and that all education systems will necessarily embrace a range of prior commitments, the crucial question to be asked at this juncture is whether a critical education that sets out to make problematic the complex nature of the world by engaging with a plurality of interpretative possibilities (including, or course, that of non-realism itself ) is not, potentially at least, less oppressive than one that imposes a non-negotiable hyper-realistic metaphysic. Taking the argument a stage further, it is surely legitimate to ask whether an education committed to the cultivation of wisdom and critical insight is not ^ despite the necessary caution that needs to be exercised with regard to the potential abuse and misuse of human reason ^ ultimately preferable to one that seeks to force children to rely on their unre£ective instincts, guided only by the oratorical skills of the teacher. In the light of Socrates' insistence that might is not necessarily right, should we not be suspicious of a pedagogy driven exclusively by the rhetorical power of persuasion, and raise as a legitimate cause for concern the possibility that such persuasion might actually constitute an act of emotional and anti-intellectual violence? Given Parker's insistence that our moral choices are simply matters of taste, and that the task of the teacher is to persuade pupils to select unre£ectively from a plurality of life-style choices, what protection does the child in the post-modern classroom have against the teacher for whom paedophilia is the height of

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good taste, and for whom the act of deriving sexual pleasure from children is a perfectly reasonable life-style choice? Perhaps, on re£ection, there is something positive to be said, in certain circumstances at least, in favour of the modernist concern for vetting and surveillance. At the heart of Parker's manifesto stands his advocacy of the unconstrained drive to satisfy desire. Such desire is not something schools should seek to inform and educate; there is no talk of wise, re£ective or intelligent desire. The task of teachers is simply to release children's yearnings from the constraints of modernity and then simply leave them to make their own way in the world. This is the point where Parker's argument hits bed-rock: post/ pedagogy is grounded a priori on the self-legitimating a¤rmation of unconstrained desire. There are, of course, those who know far more about the mechanics of cultivating desire than most school teachers. It is not clear how a post-modern education for desire can avoid preparing fertile ground for an advertising industry that exists to serve the rei¢ed needs of the consumer economy of late capitalism, an economy that feeds on the need to create desire in order to sell product. Advertisers of mobile telephones, for example, have been highly successful in marketing their merchandise as fashion accessories rather than as means of communication: `Embarrassed about your mobile?' is the catch-phrase of a fairly typical advertising campaign doing the rounds of British television at the time of writing. If children choose to spend their hard-earned pocket money on a new mobile phone simply because of its fashionable kudos this must presumably be counted a pedagogical success according to Parker's criteria, whereas children electing to think twice, having been taught how to identify the hegemonic structures in play and hence empowered to respond critically to modern advertising techniques, will simply be pawns of a repressive ideology. I'm not convinced that the mathematics adds up here. When located within the economic powerstructures of late capitalism the post/pedagogy of desire takes on a disconcertingly conservative, some might say reactionary, appearance. Lacking any pedagogical drive to equip pupils to become critical and discriminating interpreters of the economic power-structures endemic within western consumer society, post/pedagogy promises to do little more than leave children exposed and vulnerable to the dominion of the prevailing capitalist economic order.

Education and the voice of the stranger We suggested, in the ¢rst part of this book, that post-modernity at its very best constitutes the attempt to escape the blinkered intellectual vision of modernity by striving to open up new horizons of meaning. Unfortunately the educational path followed by Parker and his fellow advocates of post/ pedagogy does little to achieve this end. The two-fold strategy of replacing reason with rhetoric and identifying freedom with the nurturing of self-

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centred desire leads directly to a blinkered self-reliance on one's own instincts, resulting in the premature closure of alternative horizons of meaning. On encountering horizons of di¡erence anti-realists have little option but to respond in a neo-colonial manner: they must recon¢gure the face of the Other so that it re£ects the countenance of their own pre-established expectations, and can respond to the voice of the Other only insofar as it con¢rms their anti-realistic and anti-rational prejudices. Unable to accept any genuine alternative to its prior commitments, anti-realistic education is left advocating little more than a pedagogic induction into a non-realistic world-view. The inevitable result is a paternalistic and confessional form of schooling that constantly threatens to embrace aggressive programmes of indoctrination. The irony of this situation is unavoidable: despite all the rhetoric of freedom and subversion, anti-realistic pedagogy is actually grounded in meta-narrative marked by both intellectual rigidity and political conservatism. All this, of course, runs against the grain of the altogether more viable and valuable tradition of post-modern alterity. Derrida, Levinas and others ¢nd in post-modernity a means of restoring the face of the Other. At the heart of this particular post-modern tradition is an attentiveness to di¡erence, an openness to other horizons of meaning, and a commitment to listen with humility to alternative voices. Such attentiveness knows no boundaries: its fundamental commitment to open-mindedness extends even to those contexts in which alternative horizons of meaning challenge mainstream postmodern thought by, for example, asserting realistic truth claims or insisting on the value of human reason. Though it is inevitable that the coming together of contrasting horizons of meaning will reveal a host of tensions and con£icts this does not justify any premature closure of the ongoing struggle for understanding. The key challenge here is to decide how best to respond to the rich plurality of horizons of meaning. Nigel Blake and his colleagues have some pertinent observations to make on this issue. If and when educators do face the prospect of communicating across barriers of radical di¡erence or incommensurability, it makes all the difference in the world whether they view that prospect as hugely di¤cult or £atly impossible . . . If we see these problems as hugely di¤cult, the rational response is to invest in them ^ to invest insight, enquiry, ingenuity and, of course, time and money. If, on the other hand, we see them as a priori impossible, then we give up on them completely and put our energies into other things. (Blake et al. 1998: 10f ) The response of anti-realism to the challenge of pluralism is to insist on a radical incommensurability between di¡erent horizons of meaning and to

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view communication across boundaries as `£atly impossible'. Signi¢cantly this hermeneutic move is made before the conversation has even begun: the non-realist knows in advance that any suggestion that it is possible to engage with the real world must be dismissed out of hand. Given such presuppositions any choice between alternative horizons of meaning can only be made on the basis of unre£ective and uncritical personal preference. If the choice between horizons of meaning is simply one of taste then the anti-realist has little choice but to assert a dogma of absolute relativism and treat all horizons of meaning as possessing equal validity. As a result di¡erence is dissolved into sameness and cultural diversity con£ated into the single monolithic truth of absolute relativism. Despite its claim to celebrate di¡erence and diversity anti-realism actually rejects pluralism in favour of a nonnegotiable monism. Such avoidance tactics e¡ectively bracket-out the intellectual challenge of pluralism, leaving the student of anti-realism `free' to leave the restrictive con¢nes of the modernist classroom and play unconstrained in the post-modern cultural playground. Blake and his colleagues point out that Socrates and Plato found themselves faced with similar issues. `Just as elements in our own society side-step the problem of diversity by resort to instrumental practices more concerned with e¤ciency than truth or justice', so in Socrates' day the sophists `taught the manipulation of language and of one's audience for opportunistic and morally shallow purposes' (22). Just as `Socrates saw sophism as pernicious, not least in its corrupting foreclosure on intellectual openness in debate', so it is tempting to draw the same conclusions vis-a©-vis the pedagogy of antirealism (22). For both Socrates and Plato the only proper response to pluralism was to renew their intellectual e¡orts to make sense of the world; similarly in the present day we have little choice, if we are to avoid descending into a latter-day sophistry, but to view the challenges thrown up by pluralism as `hugely di¤cult' but not necessarily `£atly impossible'. If we follow the lead of Derrida and Levinas and insist on listening with humility to the voice of the Other, if we refuse the cheap option of prematurely closing down alternative horizons of meaning, then we must take the risk of entering into conversation with the stranger. Such conversation need not be oppressive: we do not have to establish any common ground before we begin to talk, nor do we need to know beforehand where the dialogue will end up, nor is the validity of the conversation dependent on any ultimate meeting of minds. At the same time such conversation need not be chaotic: it is possible to `secure a place for theory in the study and practice of education . . . without opening the door to scepticism and the arbitrary' (12). As our conversation with the stranger struggles to `probe matters that cannot be brought simply and unequivocally into the light', so it becomes necessary to make room `for a distinction between the kind of reading that reacts creatively and does something with the material at hand and an illinformed reading that gets it all wrong' (185).

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To insist on the need for a sharp either/or choice between chaotic freedom and oppressive violence is to reify power and establish it as an ontological principle around which education is forced to organise itself. There are, however, good reasons for not interpreting power in such an absolute fashion: the employment of power can be positive and enriching, for example in protecting children from abuse by adults; further, history o¡ers countless examples of e¡ective resistance to the abuse of power. We do not need to be so fearful of power that we take the extreme route of attempting to create a power-free anarchic utopia; a more appropriate response is to seek ways of drawing on the potential bene¢ts of power whilst simultaneously learning to resist its frequently corrosive in£uence. `Freedom is practised by interrogating our games of truth' (70). This suggests that a post-modernity open to the voice of the Other need not be afraid to recognise the value of wisdom in our stumbling attempts to respond adequately to that voice, whilst rightly retaining a deep suspicion of a narrowly conceived rationalism. Though it is true that `any and all structures of meaning may be deconstructed and reshaped, it is di¤cult to accept that we should view conceptual structure as hopelessly unjust or terroristic in itself ' (72). It seems, then, that any commitment to attend to the voice of the Other carries with it the need for some form of critical education capable of taking `the politics of knowledge more seriously, without construing that politics either as authoritarian or as a relativistic play of arbitrariness and unscrupulous interestedness' (12).

Towards a border pedagogy In Postmodern Education: Politics, Culture and Social Criticism Stanley Aronowitz and Henry Giroux advocate a form of critical education they term `border pedagogy' (Aronowitz and Giroux 1991). They reject the need to make a straight choice between modern or post-modern approaches to education, electing instead to develop a rich notion of critical education by drawing on the best insights of both traditions. The modern emphasis on the importance of critical reason in public life is combined with a post-modern openness to di¡erence and rejection of redundant metaphysical foundations. `In this way, critical pedagogy can reconstitute itself in terms that are both transformative and emancipatory' (117). They begin by suggesting that, though critical pedagogy should not be misunderstood as a monolithic discourse driven by a narrowly rationalistic set of techniques and procedures, it is nevertheless important to recognise that its liberating potential is often undermined when it is reduced to the idle chatter of dialogue, process and exchange. The danger here is that critical pedagogy will come `perilously close to emulating the liberal progressive tradition, in which teaching is reduced to getting students merely to express and assess their own experiences' (117). There is little that is genuinely critical about an education concerned merely to facilitate self-re£ection and

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self-expression; such a process simply idealises student experience as `an unproblematic vehicle of self-a¤rmation and self-consciousness' (117). The resulting pedagogy is unlikely to shed light on the various ways in which economies of power impact on self-understanding, and appears singularly illequipped to facilitate emancipation from them. On the contrary, `within this perspective it is assumed that student experience produces forms of understanding that escape the contradictions that inform them' (117). Such an idealised over-privileging of the student voice avoids engaging with the inevitably ambiguous nature of personal identities, shaped as they are ^ at least in part ^ by regimes of power. Despite the rhetoric of emancipation such an education is politically conservative, lacking any sense of its own political project and failing to address the role of student, teacher and school in respect to wider society. In this version of critical pedagogy, there is a £ight from authority and a narrow de¢nition of politics that abandons the utopian project of educating students to locate themselves in particular histories, and simultaneously to confront the limits of their own perspectives as part of a broader engagement with democratic public life. (118) Rejecting such a reductive approach to critical education, Aronowitz and Giroux advocate instead the establishment of `a border pedagogy of postmodern resistance', that is to say, a critical pedagogy of engaged praxis designed to enable `teachers and others to view education as a political, social and cultural enterprise' (118). Such an education will challenge forms of subordination that create inequalities, not by attempting to immunise the educational process from the play of power, but rather by recognising that schooling will inevitably be as contaminated by economies of power as any other area of society. It will refuse `to subordinate the purpose of schooling to narrowly de¢ned economic and instrumental considerations', and choose instead to equate `learning with the creation of critical citizens rather than merely good ones' (118). At the heart of democracy is the need for individuals to engage intelligently and responsibly with the political process. Schooling has a crucial role to play here by viewing teachers as `engaged and transformative intellectuals', and seeking to enable students to develop the capacity for critical re£ection and praxis by making `the notion of democratic di¡erence central to the organisation of curriculum and the development of classroom practice' (118). Border pedagogy `attempts to link an emancipatory notion of modernism with a postmodernism of resistance' by combining the Enlightenment's call to think for ourselves in order to avoid becoming mere pawns in a socio-economic power game, with a post-modern openness to `community, language, space, and possibility' (118). It seeks to develop a `democratic public philosophy which respects the notion of di¡erence as part

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of a common struggle to extend the quality of public life' (118). `The notion of border pedagogy presupposes not merely an acknowledgement of the shifting borders that both undermine and reterritorialize di¡erent con¢gurations of power and knowledge; it also links the notion of pedagogy to a more substantive struggle for a democratic society' (118). The curriculum of border pedagogy will not seek to o¡er a pre-packaged monolithic understanding of the world. Instead it will be genuinely pluralistic, providing the opportunity for students to engage with the multiple references that constitute di¡erent cultural codes, experiences and languages. `This means educating students to read these codes critically, to learn the limits of such codes, including the ones they use to construct their own narratives and histories' (119). Border pedagogy will engage with economies of power, identify cultural boundaries and illuminate the nature of authority. `Within this discourse, students must engage knowledge as border-crossers, as people moving in and out of borders constructed around coordinates of di¡erence and power' (119). The classroom will be a place where students encounter realms of meaning and value `that are increasingly being negotiated and rewritten as the codes and regulations that organise them are being destablized and reshaped' (119). The complex interface of power and knowledge demands a £uid curriculum, one that is continually being decentred as the `terrain of learning becomes inextricably linked to the shifting parameters of place, identity, history, and power' (119). Aronowitz and Giroux advocate a move beyond the mere identi¢cation and deconstruction of economies of domination. It is not enough simply to shield children from socio-economic power-structures: education must be concerned with the praxis of resistance, o¡ering students crucial theoretical and political tools designed to empower them to remap, reterritorialise and rewrite the established order. Aronowitz and Giroux explore, as an example of this praxis of resistance, the impact of consumer capitalism on our sense of identity. Border pedagogy, they suggest, will seek to provide a theoretical understanding of the ways in which `the production of meaning and pleasure becomes mutually constitutive of students' identities' (120). By identifying and articulating the various ways in which the advertising industry seeks to regulate desire, critical education will enable students to `mediate, relate, resist, and create particular cultural forms and forms of knowing' (120). By reading such power-structures through the eyes of the marginalised and oppressed, students will be empowered to challenge the dominating metanarratives of western culture based as they are on white, patriarchal, classspeci¢c constructions of society. `In this case, knowledge forms emanating from the margins can be used to rede¢ne the complex, multiple, heterogeneous realities that constitute those relations of di¡erence making up experiences of students who often ¢nd it impossible to de¢ne their identities through the cultural and political codes of a single, unitary culture' (120).

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Border pedagogy `emphasizes the nonsynchronous relationship between one's social position and the multiple ways in which culture is constructed and read' (120f ). An education that assumes a monolithic relationship between a pre-selected dominant cultural code and the subjectivity of the student will result only in a pedagogy of domination and oppression. If, however, education recognises that culture is genuinely pluralistic, operating at multiple levels, then it opens up the possibility of resistance. The mere recognition of the cultural reality of pluralism, however, is not enough since `these various levels and relations of culture have the potential to isolate and alienate instead of opening up the possibility of criticism and struggle' (121). It follows that border pedagogy must be proactive in enabling students to `break down those ideologies, cultural codes, and social practices that prevent students from recognizing how social forms at particular historical conjunctions operate to repress alternative readings of their own experiences, society, and the world' (121). The processes of identifying repressive power-structures and breaking down alienating boundaries, though vital components of border pedagogy, are not su¤cient in themselves. They need to be supplemented by a `project of possibility' that, by drawing on what Foucault terms `counter-memory', opens up new and emancipatory forms of personal and political identity. Counter-memory is o¡ered as a means of challenging the normative discourse of public life with the language of di¡erence. Rather than passing judgement on the past in the name of whatever truth happens to be currently fashionable, counter-memory combats established assumptions regarding truth and justice by appealing to marginalised voices of di¡erence. A healthy democracy requires more than just an appeal to some inherited collective memory; it must embrace the practice of constructing democratic social forms that enable and disempower particular subjectivities and identities; put another way, democracy in this instance becomes a referent for understanding how public life organises di¡erences di¡erently, and for understanding what this means for the ways in which schools, teachers and students de¢ne themselves as political subjects, as citizens who operate within particular con¢gurations of power. (124f ) The strategy of addressing the tension between present and past, custom and memory, mainstream and marginal, power and subordination, opens up the possibility of an optimistic vision of public life that `allows di¡erent groups to locate themselves in history while simultaneously struggling to make history', and provides `the ethical and epistemological grounds for a politics of solidarity within di¡erence' (126).

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We have suggested that anti-realistic post/pedagogy is fundamentally £awed because its underlying metaphysical and epistemological assumptions simply reproduce the repressive tendencies of modern educational theory in a postmodern guise. The implementation of the programme of post/pedagogy would simply induct children into a narrowly conceived and non-negotiable anti-realistic world-order. In sharp contrast the post-modern border pedagogy advocated by Aronowitz and Giroux, committed as it is to attend to multiple voices of di¡erence, promises to open students to a rich vein of alternative meanings, perspectives and truths. If we are genuinely open to these voices of di¡erence we must be willing to accept that they will not necessarily embrace post-modern concerns or address post-modern agendas. This leaves us with a basic choice: either to continue to engage with such horizons of di¡erence precisely in and through their di¡erence, or to subsume these di¡erences into a closed post-modern meta-narrative. Only by adopting the former option of a border pedagogy will we be able to maintain a genuinely open stance towards cultural diversity. This, in turn, entails the need for openness to be supplemented by a critical education willing not merely to recognise and identify di¡erence, but also to do the voice of the Other the honour of engaging with it on a critical level. This option opens up the possibility of an educational strategy that combines both the post-modern concern for alterity with the desire of critical realism to interrogate reality in the ongoing search for truth. It is to the outline of such a strategy that we must now turn.

Chapter 13

Critical pedagogy

There is certainly an element of truth in the claim that modern education seeks to induct children into a relatively narrow world-view rooted in the meta-narratives of naturalism, romanticism and liberalism. However, the alternative proposal tabled by advocates of post/pedagogy threatens to commit education to an even narrower anti-realistic outlook. In the previous chapter we suggested that one possible route beyond this impasse is to be found in a border pedagogy attentive to the voices of alterity and di¡erence. Here we will endeavour to couple this border pedagogy with the insights of critical realism in an attempt to establish the outlines of a critical pedagogy capable of learning from both modernity and post-modernity.

The pursuit of knowledge The model of critical education defended here is grounded in the pursuit of truthful knowledge, both of ourselves and of the world we ¢nd ourselves thrown into. As such it identi¢es itself with the classical tradition of knowledge-centred approaches to education that, as we have already seen, Paul Hirst sought to recover for modern pedagogy. At ¢rst glance the adjective `truthful' may appear to be something of a misnomer in this context; it is, however, used advisedly in the light of post-modern claims that the primary value of knowledge lies in its usefulness rather than its truthfulness. The fallibility of human reason means that there is a signi¢cant possibility of our knowledge being not merely partial and provisional, but more fundamentally corrupt and mistaken; hence the further quali¢cation that knowledgecentred education is concerned with knowledge that needs to be actively `pursued'. Knowledge is not something we are free to create for ourselves; rather we discover and generate knowledge through our interaction with that reality which, on the one hand we are intimately related to, and yet on the other always appears to be one step beyond our present horizons of understanding. We may note, in passing, that this is true even for anti-realists, whose claim that we are free to create our own hyper-realities of desire is a direct result of

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their discovery of the `knowledge' that the so-called `real' world is nothing but a chaotic and insubstantial illusion. This realistic stance rules out two other popular starting points for education: teaching oriented towards the well being of society, and teaching concerned for personal formation. Logically the question of the appropriate direction that social and personal development ought to take can only be answered with reference to our understanding of reality; that is to say, the goals of any knowledge-based education are dependent on the various ways ^ whether truthful or untruthful, legitimate or illegitimate ^ through which individuals-in-community seek to relate to the ultimate order-of-things. Since such knowledge is always contingent and provisional, critical education rules out the extremes of absolutely certain knowledge on the one hand, and a thoroughgoing relativism on the other. It also places to one side various reductive accounts of knowledge: those that equate reality with the extent of our ability to make sense of the world, those that limit knowledge to a collection of value-free factual statements, and those that restrict knowledge to mere propositional a¤rmations. Critical realism allows for a richer and more holistic approach to knowledge. The epistemological role played by informed judgement allows our knowing to embrace the realm of meaning and value as well as that of scienti¢c fact. By placing a hermeneutic of faith alongside a hermeneutic of suspicion the critical realist is able to a¤rm that knowledge proceeds directly from the fact that we indwell a world with which we are already intimately related. Because we are bound up with the world, and because our knowledge is always to a greater or lesser extent provisional, our understanding always proceeds from the givenness of that which we already know. Consequently the rei¢ed and abstract knowledge of modernity is replaced with a personal knowledge that engages the whole self: mind and body, action and re£ection, reason and experience. It follows that our pursuit of knowledge entails a struggle for more authentic forms of life, more appropriate ways of being in the world, and more truthful ways of relating to ourselves, to others-incommunity, to the natural order-of-things, and to the presence or absence of that which is sacred, transcendent or divine. Because all human knowledge is contingent ^ rooted in the given, the local and the parochial ^ it follows that there can be no universally applicable foundation for the curriculum. Hence we have no choice but to accept our lot: education will always be a partial and provisional process. This is no justi¢cation, however, for a counsel of despair that draws us into a thoroughgoing relativism. There are two reasons for this: the ¢rst is that the dogma of relativism, insofar as it claims that all beliefs are equally valid, adopts a universal rather than a local vantage point; the second is that, despite the fact that our horizons of understanding are necessarily limited, critical education is driven by the desire to strive towards universal understanding. Consequently, rather than blandly accepting that all truth claims possess equally validity, critical education urges us to learn how best to make

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informed judgements between the various options before us. Between the extremes of objective universal knowledge and a thoroughgoing relativism stands the option of a contingent rationality in which knowledge is never absolute but nevertheless is available to us, albeit with varying degrees of certainty. The primary vehicles through which such knowledge is encountered are the various subject disciplines that form the bed-rock of the curriculum, each responsible for interrogating a speci¢c stratum of reality. To dismiss such disciplines on the grounds that they generate objective knowledge that owes more to the politics of power than any engagement with the real world is untenable. This is because the knowledge they produce is not absolute but provisional. The fallibility and contingency of knowledge means that the subject disciplines themselves are never static: they possess £uid boundaries and are continually subject to revision and development as new disciplines emerge and others become redundant. Each academic discipline constitutes a site in which knowledge is the subject of ongoing dispute, debate and contention; if this were not so then research and scholarship would be super£uous activities. Though there is good evidence that the disciplines can o¡er access to an increasingly sophisticated and re¢ned knowledge of the world, there is no guarantee that such knowledge will always be progressive: mistakes are often made and research can lead us down blind alleys. It follows that a knowledge-based curriculum will always be provisional, making the best possible selection from the raft of disciplines currently available, acknowledging the plurality and diversity of our claims to knowledge, and prioritising areas of the curriculum on the basis of considered judgements as to the best way to enable students to engage intellectually with the richness and mystery of the world they ¢nd themselves cast into. Critical education seeks to engage with holistic meta-narratives alongside the study of individual subject disciplines. There are a number of reasons for this. In the ¢rst place knowledge of the order-of-things cannot simply be reduced to the sum total of the insights of the various subject disciplines. On a super¢cial level it is certainly possible for individuals to engage with speci¢c disciplines whilst claiming adherence to radically di¡erent meta-narratives telling con£icting stories about ultimate reality. Science, for example, is simply science: the atheist and the religious believer will, under normal circumstances, be able to work together without the intrusion of their radically di¡erent world-views (McGrath 2001). However, this does not mean that at the meta-critical level such di¡erences are unimportant, and it is clear that in some areas ^ the study of religion or ethics, for example ^ they will be extremely signi¢cant. It follows from this that the teaching of science will be far richer if it addresses the fundamental dispute between naturalism and theism: does the natural world explain itself, or does it demand a transcendent grounding?

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A second reason for making meta-narratives an explicit part of the curriculum is that our meta-narratives, whether implied or explicit, are of fundamental importance for the way we relate to the world. This is the case even for those who claim that a world-view is neither necessary or important: non-realists, for example, despite denying that it is either possible or desirable to identify with any holistic account of reality, tell stories of ^ and hence seek to justify ^ their particular understanding of the most appropriate way of engaging with the world, and as such embrace a particular, albeit implied, meta-narrative. A third reason follows from this: meta-narratives are simply unavoidable. We have already made the case for understanding the post-modern attack on meta-narratives not as a rejection of meta-narratives per se, but rather as a radical recon¢guration of modern accounts of the order-of-things. Thus both anti-realistic and alteristic forms of post-modernity o¡er speci¢c accounts of the nature of reality and of the most appropriate way in which we should conduct our lives, both personally and communally, in the light of them: the former by insisting that since reality is fundamentally chaotic we are free to construct our own personal stories, the latter by stressing the need to live life in the borderlands of ultimate mystery. Critical education seeks to identify and explore the tension between con£icting meta-narratives in the belief that an informed understanding of the issues and options involved is necessary if students are to be enabled to engage wisely in the struggle for authentic and truthful relationships with the actual order-of-things. It also recognises the contribution of individual subject disciplines to this task, and hence of the need for dialogue between individual subject disciplines and broader meta-narratives. Such dialogue is best achieved by invoking the dialectic of a hermeneutical circle through which the parts are interpreted in the light of the whole, and the whole in the light of the parts. Just as the various subject disciplines interpret, and are themselves interpreted by, a range of meta-narratives, so the various metanarratives interpret, and are themselves interpreted by, a range of subject disciplines. The cultivation of an ongoing dialogue between a variety of meta-narratives and individual subject disciplines is a necessary dimension of any education grounded in the pursuit of knowledge.

Knowledge and power Our attempt to ground education in the pursuit of knowledge cannot hope to avoid the post-modern contention that knowledge is inevitably embroiled in economies of power, a contention with which critical education is in broad agreement. In an educational setting the power^knowledge relationship opens up the crucial problem of indoctrination. In situations in which knowledge is assumed to be objective and unproblematic, indoctrination ^ when

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understood simply as the transmission of true knowledge or doctrine ^ is frequently seen as a perfectly justi¢able activity. Indeed in the medieval period a good teacher was, almost by de¢nition, a good indoctrinator: one who successfully transmitted truth to his or her pupils. This process is perhaps most clearly visible nowadays in the confessional modes of education operating within the boundaries of religious communities, though it is equally present ^ though less transparently so ^ in attempts to induct children into the closed ideologies of naturalism, romanticism, liberalism and anti-realism. Just as Muslim educators will have no qualms about inducting children into the meta-narrative of Islam, so few liberals will view the transmission of the secular virtue of personal autonomy as anything other than an entirely commendable activity, and few defenders of post/pedagogy will baulk at transmitting the cultural norms and metaphysical assumptions of anti-realism. `Indoctrination', then, is normally employed simply as a term of abuse directed towards educators transmitting beliefs and values that their critics happen not to agree with. The pluralistic and hence problematic nature of values, beliefs and meta-narratives, when coupled with the recognition that knowledge always proceeds from the local and given, suggests the necessity of recognising that, if not indoctrination, then at least some form of cultural transmission constitutes an important and unavoidable dimension of the pedagogical process. In this context critical education seeks to steer a course between the twin dangers of, on the one hand seeking to transcend the power^knowledge relationship by laying claim to neutral universal knowledge supposedly uncontaminated by economies of power, and on the other embracing a sceptical relativism in which absolute freedom supposedly breaks the power^ knowledge connection. Since we have no access to neutral knowledge, and since relativism is itself a move within an ongoing power-game, it appears that any approach to teaching will inevitably transmit knowledge already contaminated by economies of power. It follows that critical education cannot avoid engaging with, and responding to, the power-structures endemic within the pedagogical process. Given that the cultural transmission of beliefs that others disagree with is unavoidable, critical education seeks to make a virtue out of necessity. By making the process of cultural transmission explicit, self-conscious, problematic and above all open to alternative possibilities, it is possible to transform a naive indoctrinatory process into a critical ^ and hence potentially empowering ^ activity. At this point critical education makes three fundamental moves. The ¢rst is to recognise that power-structures have signi¢cantly less authority over us once they are identi¢ed and revealed for what they are. The identi¢cation of our own presuppositions and prejudices, combined with an acknowledgement of the presuppositions and prejudices embedded in society at large, in the institution of schooling, in the curriculum and in the pedagogical process itself, goes at least some way towards establishing a critical consciousness

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capable of developing appropriate ways of responding to the politics of knowledge. The second is to recognise that the provisionality of knowledge insisted upon by critical realism ^ in which knowledge is not simply given but must be actively pursued ^ demands that cultural transmission take place in the context of an open curriculum concerned to introduce pupils to a plurality of meta-narratives, and that such a curriculum be driven by a critical pedagogy concerned to enable students to learn to make informed judgements between con£icting truth claims. The third is to embrace the post-modern insistence that education is always open to alterity and the voice of the Other, a process that is designed to resist the ever present danger of drawing premature conclusions regarding the nature and scope of our knowledge of the world. This discussion suggests a dual focus for critical education: ¢rstly the grounding of students in the established norms and values of the school; secondly a critical process through which these norms are subject to critical scrutiny in the light of alternative possibilities. The former is justi¢ed on the grounds that since cultural transmission is unavoidable schools might as well pass on the very best traditions available to them, and the latter on the grounds that openness to alternative horizons of meaning is inherently a good thing. Imagine a group of children raised within a religious community that teaches that the natural world is the product of God's creative activity. Now imagine that same group attending a secular school and being taught not just science, but science presented within the exclusive interpretative framework of a naturalistic meta-narrative that asserts that the natural order is self-generating, and that ultimately our knowledge of reality can be reduced to an account of the laws of physical cause and e¡ect operating in the universe. Unless these children elect to live double lives it will be necessary, at some stage, for them to choose between these the competing options of a theistic and naturalistic world-view: both embrace fundamentally incompatible outlooks on life that carry signi¢cant existential implications for the way they choose to engage with the world, and both are able to draw on a rich tradition of supporting scholarship in defence of their respective positions. In the absence of a critical education designed to enable the children to undertake an informed investigation of the issue they will presumably be forced to make an uninformed choice between the con£icting claims of their science teacher and their religious community. In this situation power clearly wins out over knowledge. Now imagine the arrival of a new science teacher who shares the same naturalistic beliefs as his or her predecessor, but insists on retaining an open agenda in the classroom when attending to the issues of the relationship between science and religion. Precisely the same power-structures will be in place: the authority of the faith community, the authority of the secular school, the authority of the science teacher, the indecision of the students.

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However, the new open agenda is likely to signi¢cantly alter the dynamic of the learning process: in the ¢rst place, the prejudices and presuppositions of all parties involved will now be deliberately and openly articulated and placed on the table for discussion; secondly, the relative merits of the con£icting naturalistic and theological meta-narratives will be explicitly taught; thirdly, the children will be deliberately encouraged to develop the necessary skills and insights to be able to actively engage in the debate; and ¢nally the entire process will be grounded in an intellectual curiosity driven by a sense of awe, wonder and mystery in the face of the richness and complexity of the natural world. The result will not be the circumnavigation of power, but rather a critical engagement with hegemonic structures in a manner designed to enable children to respond to the various issues in an informed and intelligent manner. Power is certainly not destroyed, by-passed or transcended, but at least children will be more likely to develop the means of making crucial decisions regarding their personal commitments and beliefs in a manner that is not entirely subservient to blind instinct or the imposition of some external authority.

Social and personal education We must look in more detail at the suggestion that though the pursuit of truth takes priority in critical education, this process cannot be abstracted from legitimate educational concerns for social and personal development. Though such concerns constitute important aspects of education, to begin with them presumes that we already know the criteria for whatever constitutes personal growth and the well being of society. In the context of the world-view of modernity this assumes that the meta-narratives of naturalism, romanticism and liberalism possess an ontological priority that justi¢es their use as foundational narratives for any given pedagogic programme. Similarly from a post-modern perspective it implies the adoption of an anti-realistic world-view committed to the belief that personal and social development is dependent on the satisfaction of unconstrained desire. Both options threaten to result in closed, paternalistic and authoritarian forms of education in which individuals and society are shaped by the preconceived ideals ^ be they naturalistic, romantic, liberal or anti-realistic ^ of those who control the pedagogic process. In our pluralistic culture we have little choice but to acknowledge that we are faced with a diversity of secular and religious world-views that adhere to contrasting and frequently con£icting readings of the nature of reality, and hence embrace a range of di¡erent understandings as to what precisely constitutes appropriate personal and social development. Thus, for example, the Islamic identi¢cation of personal ful¢lment with submission to the will of Allah rather than the secular ideal of personal autonomy, together with the belief that the public good is grounded in a theocratic rather than democratic

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polity, departs fundamentally from the normative position of occidental liberalism. It is precisely this lack of consensus regarding the ground, nature and scope of personal and social formation that leads advocates of critical education to identify the pursuit of truthful knowledge of the ultimate orderof-things as possessing both logical and ontological priority in the educational process. What is lacking in approaches to education that proceed from preestablished blueprints regarding the goals of social and personal education is any notion of education as a transformative process in which pupils are encouraged to question the established social and personal goals of society by engaging with substantial meta-critical questions. In the absence of such a critical agenda education will tend to produce contented pigs rather than discontented philosophers, with educational debate between traditionalists and progressives focusing on exactly what type of contented pig is preferable. This is seen clearly in debates concerning whether English teachers should focus on the traditionalist agenda of instilling basic linguistic skills in order to enable children to become competent users of the English language and thereby enhance their future employment prospects, or alternatively on the progressive agenda of personal formation in which language operates as a medium for stimulating self-expression. Why not a both/and rather than an either/or here, with the meta-critical dispute itself forming part of the formal curriculum? It is not, for a second, being suggesting that teaching for social and personal development is unimportant; on the contrary, it is precisely because such teaching is a vital component of education that it demands to be approached in a critical rather than a naive manner. Critical realism's approach to the nature of personal and social development is grounded in the notion of relational identity. It assumes that our developing identities are not primarily dependent on an introspective selfawareness constructed on the basis of our freedom-from external pressures and contacts, but rather on our freedom-for ongoing relationships with othersin-community, with the natural order-of-things, and with the presence or absence of God. This notion of relational identity has two important consequences. The ¢rst is that the dividing wall between personal development and social development is broken down: we cannot develop as individuals without simultaneously contributing to the development of society, neither can we contribute to the development of society without also developing as individuals. The second is that both personal and social development cannot take place without reference, whether implicit or explicit, to the issue of the ultimate nature of reality. It follows from this that education for social and personal development is logically and ontologically dependent on the pursuit of truthful knowledge of, and hence relationship with, the ultimate order-ofthings. All of the meta-narratives we have considered so far, be they religious, modern or post-modern, carry with them crucial assumptions about what

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it means to be an authentic human being and what it means for society to £ourish. The plurality of meta-narratives presents us with a diverse range of incompatible options when it comes to making decisions as to the social and personal goals of education. Since education for individual and social growth cannot avoid questions of ultimate truth the only remaining question concerns whether decisions about the ultimate nature of reality are taken prior to the start of the learning process, in which case pupils will be inducted into the world-view imposed by those who control the curriculum, or whether such meta-critical questions are allowed to form an explicit part of the curriculum, in which case education will need to adopt some form of critical pedagogy. This question does not require an either/or response: since induction into one or the other cultural norm will inevitably take place, the task of schooling is two-fold ^ to transmit the best cultural package available and to insist that pupils also learn to engage critically with alternative options. In both cases the pursuit of knowledge will focus not on abstract and rei¢ed propositions, but on a holistic engagement with the world that is existentially challenging in cognitive, a¡ective and practical terms.

The context of critical pedagogy Critical education is always and necessarily contextual. The pursuit of knowledge cannot avoid proceeding from a given cultural, intellectual and pedagogical location. The knowledge, beliefs and values of a variety of local, regional, national and global communities will constantly inform and impinge on the task of teachers. The school as institution will own, whether implicitly or explicitly (through, for example, a clearly articulated mission statement) certain core values and perceptions of reality from which its educational aims and aspirations will proceed. The curriculum it adopts will necessarily make prior judgements concerning the knowledge and skills it deems appropriate to impart to children. Similarly teachers, parents and pupils will, in a variety of di¡erent ways, encroach on the educational process from distinctive and established horizons of meaning. There will always be disputes and di¡erences of opinion within the school community, and these tensions will often be clearly visible: contextual education will necessarily be a rather messy a¡air. Despite this, critical pedagogy will always proceed on the basis of knowledge that is both given and grounded. Though a school will inevitably transmit such contextual knowledge and values to children, both implicitly through the ethos of the school and explicitly through the curriculum, there is a constant danger of such contextual knowledge being objecti¢ed, rei¢ed and imposed uncritically. This danger is avoided by virtue of the fact that critical education will constantly strive to juxtapose the horizon of the given context with the horizon of alterity. The search for truth, because it recognises the limitations of human ways of knowing and hence the provisional nature of knowledge, will constantly strive for

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newer and better understanding, both by seeking to penetrate deeper still into that which we already know and by striving to engage with horizons of meaning beyond our present experience. The pursuit of knowledge, that is to say, will always reach for the universal despite its parochial starting point, regardless of the fact that the universal will always be one step beyond our grasp. It is the tension between local context and universal aspiration that provides critical pedagogy with its essential dynamic. This synergetic relationship between given horizons of meaning and an ongoing openness to new possibilities carries implications for the way society manages the institution of schooling. In particular the model of a comprehensive education in which similar schools operate with a common shared curriculum becomes di¤cult to justify. Given that schools will inevitably embody a given set of values, and that society remains deeply divided as to which particular values ought to drive public schooling, there would appear to be a strong case in favour of a structural pluralism in which a diversity of contrasting schools are free to engage in the educative search for truth from a number of di¡erent starting points. This would involve the establishment of a range of schools: secular and religious, modern and post-modern, radical and traditional. This, of course, opens up the possibility that some of these schools may elect to operate within pre-modern and extra-occidental horizons of meaning that, to western eyes at least, appear narrowly restrictive. Such schools may well adopt a closed pedagogy concerned to provide their pupils with access only to an informed understanding of the speci¢c world-view within which they elect to operate. The danger here is that the policy of structural pluralism will end up sponsoring a range of sectarian schools. This is, however, on balance probably a risk worth taking; indeed, it can be argued that the £ourishing of minority groups without compromise to their distinctive identities constitutes a necessary part of any health democracy. The post-modern commitment to alterity and di¡erence should be allowed to impact on education at this structural level. Though the occidental legacy of the Enlightenment will inevitably struggle with the notion of uncritical and sectarian forms of schooling, the fact that minority communities elect to educate their children without reference to the Enlightenment's ideal of autonomous freethinking individuals must be respected if education is to be genuinely open to voices of di¡erence. It is important here to recognise the status of this defence of critical education. The approach is not intended as a framework for all schools, and there is certainly no desire to impose it on those communities who might ¢nd it unacceptable. Rather it sets out to raise a set of critical questions that schools may, if they choose, use to interrogate their received traditions, agendas, concerns and aspirations ^ in particular, though by no means exclusively, those liberal secular schools which ¢nd themselves operating within an

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occidental tradition operating on the borderlands between modernity and post-modernity.

The process of critical pedagogy The tensions between the contextual starting point of critical education and its dynamic orientation towards alterity and di¡erence also carry implications for the role of the teacher. The contextual nature of the pedagogical process makes it inevitable that teachers will transmit to their pupils, albeit with varying degrees of explicitness and intensity, both their own values and beliefs and those of the school they represent. Given that this process is unavoidable it would appear to make sense to pass on to pupils the very best cultural heritage that the school is capable of o¡ering. At the same time the commitment to critical openness will also require the teacher to equip pupils to critically examine the knowledge, values and culture transmitted in the classroom as part of the ongoing pursuit of knowledge. Nicholas Wolterstor¡ argues that schools should function as educative agents concerned to transform the lives of pupils (Wolterstor¡ 1980). Since theory and praxis cannot be distinguished from one another teachers should adopt e¡ective and responsible strategies for shaping how children tend to act (Wolterstor¡ 2002). This involves, in the ¢rst place, a willingness to discipline children: teachers should not be afraid to praise and reward all that is good in a child's knowledge, behaviour and achievements, whilst at the same time being willing to challenge that which is unworthy. Secondly the teacher should seek to model the kind of thinking and action expected of the child: `the wisdom of the ages tells us, and contemporary psychological studies con¢rm, that if we want to in£uence how somebody acts, it helps if we act that way' (87). This may well seem rather paternalistic, if not authoritarian, to some readers: the strength of Wolterstor¡ 's argument may become clearer if we consider the attribution of praise and blame in the context of the disapproval of racist behaviour on the part of the child, with the teacher modelling a tolerant and empathetic life-style. Thirdly education for responsible action entails providing good reasons why the child should think and act in a particular way. It is at this point within the framework of critical education that we pass from the process of inducting the child into the host culture to that of opening the child's eyes to the horizon of alterity and di¡erence. The provision of good reasons why students should think and act in a particular way cannot be dislocated from complex and ambiguous questions of ultimate truth, and it is the child's personal engagement in the pursuit of knowledge and struggle to ¢nd better and more truthful ways of being in the world that potentially transform a closed formative education into an open transformative one. Such a critical education embraces a three-fold hermeneutic: a hermeneutic of a¤rmation through which the child is con¢rmed in, and encouraged to

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identify, articulate, explore and own the world-view they bring with them into the classroom; a hermeneutic of exploration through which the child is invited to engage with alternative ways of making sense of reality, alternative ways of living a truthful life; and a hermeneutic of re£ective wisdom and practical action, through which the child seeks ways of moving forward in the light of his or her ongoing negotiation of the horizon of the given in the light of the horizon of the possible. One of the key tasks of the teacher is to bring di¡erent horizons of meaning into dialogue with one another. This may constitute an unintentional extracurricular activity, concerned with negotiating meanings and tensions that inevitably emerge as a result of the pluralistic nature of the school community: between home and school, child and teacher, child and child, and so forth. However, the teacher's primary role here will be to facilitate the formal, intentional and explicit pedagogical activity of drawing the child's horizon of understanding into a critical relationship with alternative horizons of meaning. This will require a number of hermeneutical moves: ¢rstly a grammatical hermeneutic in which the child encounters the basic language and phenomenological structure of any alternative horizon of meaning; secondly an empathetic hermeneutic through which the child identi¢es points of contact and similarity between his or her own horizon and that of the topic under investigation; thirdly a receptive hermeneutic in which the child opens up to the truth claims of the alternative horizon; fourthly an emancipative hermeneutic in which the child learns to recognise and negotiate between the various power-structures at work in this learning process; and ¢fthly a transformative hermeneutic in which the child uses the ongoing learning process as a means of re£ecting on, reassessing, and con¢rming or revising his or her own prior beliefs and commitments. This multifaceted hermeneutical approach will be driven by a rich holistic notion of wisdom. This seeks to pass beyond reductive accounts of the nature of knowledge and understanding; beyond the abstract rationalism required by a naturalistic metaphysic; beyond the expressive sensibility beloved of romanticism; beyond the cultivation of the virtue of autonomy demanded by liberalism; beyond the unconstrained imagination celebrated by antirealistic forms of post-modernity. Wisdom seeks to draw all these aspects of the mind, and more, into a holistic unity. To be wise is to be simultaneously knowledgeable, informed, re£ective, rational, a¡ective, virtuous, responsible, imaginative and practical. Such wisdom is marked by a secure and con¢dent ownership of one's beliefs, commitments, life-style and meta-narrative; a keen sense of one's own fallibility coupled with an openness to the face and voice of the Other; and a willingness and ability to pursue truth persistently, honestly, willingly and above all wisely. Elsewhere I have set out the case for the spiritual dimension of life pervading the whole of the curriculum (Wright 2000a). There I de¢ne spirituality as the developing relationship of the individual-in-community with that

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which is, or is perceived to be, ultimately true, ultimately good and ultimately valuable. Rather than education being content to operate in the local sphere of the parochial, mundane and insigni¢cant, I argue for a rich, universal and existentially challenging agenda for education. We are granted only one short life, and if we are to live it to the full it would appear to make sense to strive for the very best in all our knowing, doing and being in the world. This demands the cultivation of a spiritual wisdom restlessly striving after truth, and it is the transformative potential of such wisdom that critical education seeks to tap into. In this chapter we have attempted to sketch the outlines of a framework for a critical pedagogy designed to mediate between the extremes of modernist and post-modern approaches to education. In doing so we sought to combine the insights provided by critical realism's revisionist reading of the legacy of modernity with the distinctive post-modern commitment to openness and alterity. We suggested that critical education should be grounded in the pursuit of truth, a task that avoids becoming totalitarian by virtue of its ongoing openness to the horizon of the Other, and argued that, though the pursuit of knowledge has logical priority within critical education, this process cannot be distinguished from a pedagogical responsibility for personal and social development. Though critical education makes no claim to be able to transcend the power-structures that inevitably impinge on our ways of knowing, it does claim to o¡er a more e¡ective way of resisting inappropriate manifestations of power than the strategies adopted by both modern and anti-realistic approaches to learning. By starting from the given nature of our local knowledge and striving to move our understanding towards that which is ultimate and universal, critical education becomes a fundamentally spiritual process. It is this model of critical education that we will draw on as the basis for an approach to religious education in a post-modern context.

Part IV

Religious education

Chapter 14

Modern religious education

It is time, ¢nally, to turn our attention to religious education. One of the major challenges facing religious educators ^ to put matters a little crudely ^ is that of teaching what is predominantly a pre-modern branch of learning within the framework of a modern education system. Hence our opening question: `How have the foundational meta-narratives of modernity ^ naturalism, romanticism and liberalism ^ impacted on contemporary approaches to religious education?'

Legitimation and accommodation Historically speaking religious education has, almost without exception, assumed a confessional agenda, taking as its primary objective the enculturation of children into the belief patterns, liturgical practices and normative values of the religious community. The religious teacher was concerned to cultivate character, guide behaviour and transmit beliefs in ways appropriate to the expectations of the host community. Though such education was often intellectually demanding it was normally carried out within the con¢nes of the faith-world of the community: distancing notions of critical openness, autonomy and neutrality, now so familiar to contemporary religious educators, constitute alien concepts imposed from outside in the wake of the Enlightenment. It is clear that the onset of modernity forced confessional religious education to confront an entirely new set of problems and challenges. Of these three stand out as being particularly signi¢cant. First, the modern reduction of religious belief to the level of mere subjective opinion raised questions about the status and legitimacy of religious knowledge. Second, the use of enculturation as the primary method of religious teaching came into direct con£ict with the modern distrust of received tradition and commitment to the authority of autonomous reason. Third, the liberal imperatives of freedom of belief and tolerance of the beliefs of others challenged the moral integrity of any form of religious education making exclusive claims on behalf of a particular religious tradition.

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Since modernity had been quick to marginalise religion, there was little reason to think that its attitude toward religious education would be any different. Edwin Cox, one of the founding fathers of modern religious education in the United Kingdom, insisted on the urgent need to accommodate the subject within the cultural norms of modernity (Cox 1983: 7). If religious education was to retain a foothold within the public education system it would have to ¢ght for the privilege, so one of the most crucial issues facing contemporary religious education concerns its identity and legitimacy vis-a©-vis modernity. As David Day observes, the search for an adequate response to this challenge has become a key driver of the subject in recent decades: what `appears to be a discussion about the nature of religious education is really about curriculum politics . . . in this search for survival and status, the method of legitimation becomes all important' (Day 1985: 59). The major task facing modern religious educators in the United Kingdom was to create a form of education that transcended a narrow Christian confessionalism and related positively to the foundation meta-narratives of modernity. To achieve this they developed a three-fold strategy. In the ¢rst place they followed the lead of the rationalistic wing of the Enlightenment in di¡erentiating between objective religious facts and subjective religious beliefs, utilising the distinction as the basis on which to impart knowledge about religion whilst still retaining a neutral attitude towards the rich diversity of belief systems represented in the country. Secondly they responded to romanticism's recognition of the central importance of religious experience by seeking to cultivate children's innate spiritual sensibilities, albeit in a manner that avoided any suggestion of indoctrination into a speci¢c religious tradition. Thirdly they established religious education within a framework of liberal morality, encouraging pupils to embrace their own freedom of belief and tolerate the beliefs of others. Given the need to establish a positive accommodation with the foundational meta-narratives of modernity it comes as no surprise to ¢nd modern religious educators adopting the naturalistic^romantic dualism that cuts through the heart of modernity, and deliberately exploiting the divide between traditional subject-centred education and progressive child-centred education. This is clearly visible in Edwin Cox's classic distinction between `understanding religion' and `religious understanding', which was to become formative for the subject (Cox 1983). According to Cox understanding religion entails `a relatively detached knowledge of the externals of faith' that, when presented in objective and academic terms accessible to any rational being, `will probably not signi¢cantly alter the student's lifestyle' (5). In sharp contrast religious understanding constitutes a far more penetrating and existentially committed process requiring experience of the quality of a faith's beliefs and practices, an emotional response to its cult objects, and an ability to perceive and

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respond approvingly to its ultimate function . . . those who so involve themselves say that their understanding of their religion is of a di¡erent quality from that of those who stand outside and look on. (5) This distinction was taken up into the heart of modern religious education. Michael Grimmitt, for example, distinguishes between `dimensional' and `experiential' modes of religious pedagogy: the former is concerned with an engagement with the phenomenon of religion ^ its mythology, ritual, ethics, doctrine, communal life and range of spiritual experiences; the latter seeks to cultivate the existential insight necessary if any genuine depth of religious understanding is to be achieved (Grimmitt 1973). Operating within this tradition many current religious education syllabuses in Britain have adopted a core distinction between `learning-from' and `learning-about' religion (Schools Curriculum and Assessment Authority 1994).

Learning about religion In a plural society the proclamation of a single, exclusive and particular religious truth is bound to cause o¡ence, doubly so if this one truth is imposed on all children under the aegis of a state-sponsored education system. In multifaith Britain in the early 1970s it was increasingly clear that a public religious education rooted in Christian confessionalism was incongruous and that accusations of religious imperialism were almost impossible to answer. The response of religious educators was a positive one. Rather than see religion removed from the sphere of public education they sought to develop an approach acceptable to a variety of religious and secular persuasions. In doing so they had a substantial history to draw on: traditional confessional religious education had learnt to teach Christianity in a manner acceptable to a wide variety of di¡erent Christian denominations at a time ^ the latter half of the nineteenth century and opening decades of the twentieth century ^ when the ecumenical movement had yet to make any real impact and ¢erce interdenominational rivalry remained a signi¢cant fact of life. The resulting compromise, in the form of an agreement to teach a `commondenominator' version of Christianity indistinctive of any one Christian denomination, o¡ered modern religious educators a model to work with. Why not a common-denominator portrayal of `religion' in a form acceptable to all? Towards the end of the 1960s J.W.D. Smith asked `whether Christians and non-Christians could co-operate in a common policy for religious and moral education in state schools' (Smith 1969: 17). He distinguished between an orthodox understanding of religious doctrine as revealed dogma and a liberal understanding of doctrine as the outward expression of inner religious experience. So long as revealed dogma remained the central category for

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understanding religion the substantial doctrinal di¡erences between religious traditions could not be ignored. However, if doctrine is seen as no more than the non-cognitive second-order expression of a primary religious experience, and if this primary experience is taken to be common to all religions, then it ought to be possible to develop a generic common-denominator representation of religion in the classroom. Smith interpreted religious experience as the sense of mystery that gives depth and poignancy to human life, re£ected especially in that self-forgetful love of which the life and death of Jesus provides a supreme example and inspiration. He contended that it is possible to achieve common agreement about the intrinsic importance of such experience regardless of any prior religious or secular commitments. This identi¢cation of a universal spiritual experience, albeit expressed in a variety of ways in speci¢c religious traditions, provided the theological basis for a common religious education. Having established such a universal theology modern religious education was content to allow further theological questions to be pushed to the sidelines, since the danger remained of particular religious doctrines being `misunderstood' as making exclusive truth claims that carried assumptions about the superiority of one religious tradition over all others. Hence modern religious education embraced a clear ^ if only implied ^ theological stance, viz. a theological universalism in which particular religious traditions o¡er equally true and equally valuable secondary expressions of a primal and universal religious experience. The emergence of modern religious education coincided with the establishment of university departments of religious studies as an alternative to traditional faculties of theology (Hinnells (ed.) 1970, Smart 1968, 1995). These new departments quickly embraced a commitment to objective knowledge derived from the meta-narrative of naturalism: a modern hermeneutic of understanding-seeking-faith replaced the traditional theological hermeneutic of faith-seeking-understanding as the appropriate starting point for the investigation of religion. The various disciplines gathered under the umbrella of religious studies tended to view religion from an immanent rather than a transcendent vantage point, regarding it primarily as a dimension of human culture rather than as a response to divine revelation. The adoption of methodologies drawn from the human sciences produced a Religionswissenschaften ^ a science of religions ^ that, in seeking to o¡er an objective understanding of religion, could lay greater claim to neutrality than a theological method requiring prior faith commitment. Above all it was the utilisation of phenomenology as a means of describing the phenomenon of religion and entering into an eidetic appreciation of its essential nature, that provided modern religious education with its key interpretative tool. The ensuing neutral representation of religion, predicated on a creative synergy between an implicit universal theology and an explicit scienti¢c study of religion, was not, however, without its problems.

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In the ¢rst place it lacked a critical edge, though admittedly this was not for want of trying. Ninian Smart, one of the key players in the emergence of the secular study of religion in the United Kingdom and its application to religious education, presented a vision for the development of the subject that went far beyond mere phenomenological description. He advocated a multidisciplinary approach to teaching religion that would draw on `a chain of logic from the empirical study of religion to the parahistorical' (Smart 1968: 106). Smart was aware that to grasp the heart of religion it was necessary to grapple with questions of ultimate truth, and recognised that the twin disciplines most likely to achieve this were philosophy and theology. Religious education must transcend the informative . . . in the direction of initiation into understanding the meaning of, and into questions about the truth and worth of, religion . . . religious studies should emphasise the descriptive historical side of religion, but need thereby to enter into dialogue with the parahistorical claims of religious and antireligious outlooks. (105f ) However, this bold vision was quickly eclipsed by the safer option of limiting religious education to the phenomenological description of religious culture. Phenomenological religious education tended to reduce learning to the process of listing, labelling and categorising items of religious culture, progress in religious understanding being equated with the quantitative expansion of factual knowledge rather than the qualitative development of critical insight and understanding. Though phenomenology sought to move beyond mere description into an eidetic vision of the essence of religion this tended to manifest itself in the classroom as little more than a concern to encourage children towards a sympathetic tolerance of di¡erent religious cultures. The second major problem was the e¡ective negation of questions of religious truth. Its concern to remain neutral led modern religious education to misrepresent the self-understanding of speci¢c religious traditions (Hardy 1975, 1976, 1979). The commitment to a common-denominator representation of religion led to the distinctive truth claims of individual religious traditions being subsumed under the generic category of `religion'. This process of bracketing-out truth claims in the classroom carried with it the implication that realistic truth is not central to the concerns of religious believers. Trevor Cooling has argued convincingly that by embracing a working neutrality religious education simply ends up advocating a universal unitary theology by default (Cooling 1994a). The third problem facing modern religious education in its attempt to o¡er a neutral and objective representation of religion in the classroom stems from the recognition that every outlook, including that of so-called

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neutrality, carries with it a commitment to a speci¢c set of values. The modern concern for objectivity eclipses the possibility that religion is only properly understood from the vantage point of faith, and in doing so demands acceptance of the values and assumptions of modernity itself. For Edward Hulmes neutrality in the classroom is not merely undesirable but also an impossible ideal to achieve. How far is it possible for a believer to pretend to espouse a philosophical neutrality which is alien to his deepest convictions and experience? . . . Every teacher brings a personal commitment to bear in teaching . . . The only sensible way forward is to accept this limitation as inescapable, and not to insist on a neutrality which is unattainable. (Hulmes 1979: 48) According to Hulmes the most appropriate way to deal with disputed questions of faith, value and commitment is not to disguise them under a veil of neutrality but to make them as visible as possible so that pupils may make judgements based on knowledge rather than ignorance. This view is re£ected in Leslie Newbigin's insistence that the religious educator is `under an obligation to expose for examination the fundamental axioms, the prior decisions about what is allowed to count as evidence, which underlie his way of understanding' (Newbigin 1982: 99). Considered together these three objections show clearly how modern religious education, in seeking a universally acceptable means of representing religion in the classroom, ends up imposing the naturalistic ideal of objective knowledge onto religion. Ironically the desire to avoid indoctrination leads directly, albeit inadvertently, to the indoctrinating of pupils into the metanarrative of modern naturalism. Religion here is e¡ectively reduced to the sum of religious culture as it is described, organised and categorised within the framework of post-Enlightenment modes of thought. We can indeed learn-about religion but only at the excessively high cost of turning our backs on critical thinking, marginalising the various truth claims of religion and adopting a pseudo-neutrality. The representation of religion through the ¢lter of the modern ideal of objectivity skates the surface of the truth claims of religion and responds only super¢cially to its existential demands. To be absolutely fair this was a problem modern religious educators were keenly aware of, and which they attempted to respond to by supplementing learning-about religion with the more existentially relevant strategy of learning-from religion.

Learning from religion Since the neutral description of religious phenomena was not in itself capable of producing a genuinely religiously educated person, educators sought to

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supplement such description with a strategy of learning-from religion designed to enable students to engage with the experiential heart of religion. As Raymond Holley observes, religious education cannot merely be `concerned with imparting information about the religions of the world': it must also be prepared to `provoke intellectual understanding of the spirituality of personality in all its extensiveness and dynamism' (Holley 1978: 65f ). Holley's choice of language here is signi¢cant. We saw earlier how Smart believed religious understanding to be dependent upon our ability to wrestle with the parahistorical questions raised by the truth claims of the various world religions. Holley, however, directs our attention towards religious experience, implying that the appropriate way to transcend the merely factual is not to turn outwards and ask realistic questions about the ultimate order-of-things, but rather to turn inwards and explore the experiential realm of spiritual inner space. His strategy is supported by John Wilson, for whom the `metaphysical or doctrinal superstructure' of religion is `in one very real sense, unimportant in itself [since] it is the kind of emotions to which it has been witness that we have to detect and educate' (Wilson 1971: 171). Both Holley and Wilson assume an experiential^expressive model of religion, in which the role of religious doctrine is to give expression to spiritual experience rather than provide a realistic description of the ultimate order-of-things. The strategy of learning-from religion re£ects religious education's wholesale accommodation to the meta-narrative of romanticism, with its claim that ultimate truth is to be found within, in that private inner space where we encounter our primal spiritual desires. For religion to be authentic and meaningful it must be intimately related to this realm of spiritual experience. The ideology of romanticism e¡ectively undermines any possibility of attaching lasting signi¢cance to the realistic truth claims of the various religious traditions: such truth claims are merely the secondary expressions of primary religious experience and as such they have no cognitive signi¢cance, their basic function being to articulate spiritual experience rather than describe reality. It is interesting to note that when the category of religious experience ¢rst entered the vocabulary of religious educators in the 1960s its role was the polar opposite of that proposed by the religious educators we have just looked at. Harold Loukes and Ronald Goldman insisted that religious education should focus on children's a¡ective experiences as a means of enabling them to engage in an authentic way with religious doctrine: Loukes arguing for the need to correlate pupils' deepest existential concerns with Christian doctrine, Goldman suggesting that the stimulation of children's openness to spiritual experience constitutes a necessary precondition for any authentic understanding of abstract theological concepts (Loukes 1961, Goldman 1964). Despite this the cultivation of spiritual experience came to be seen as

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an end in itself, rather than as a key heuristic dimension of the pursuit of religious truth. Increasingly religious experience came to be viewed as a distinctive sui generis experience. According to Kenneth Surin `religious experience is a distinct form of experience with its own essence and structure; from which it follows accordingly, that ordinary experience cannot be the starting point of religious experience' (Surin 1980: 100). Developing this position, David Hay saw the chief task of religious education as that of presenting the phenomenon of religion `for what it claims to be ^ the response of human beings to what they experience as sacred' (Hay 1985: 142). Religious educators must be prepared to cultivate children's natural capacity for spiritual experience, a capacity signi¢cantly eroded by the modern age's materialism, rationalism and inbuilt suspicion of the religious dimension of life. The belief that many pupils `have di¤culty hanging on to the spiritual, because ``really'' the fundamentals of the world are particles and space' is no longer tenable (140). Hay points to empirical research suggesting that transcendent experience is part and parcel of our standard psychological and biological make-up (Hay 1982). This, he claims, justi¢es the strategy of seeking to undermine attempts by the rational despisers of religion to suppress religious experience. Religious educators `must help pupils to open their personal awareness to those aspects of their experience which are recognised by religious people as the root of religion' (Hay 1985: 140). Pupils must be taught to penetrate beneath surface appearances and grapple with the existential heart of religious faith: `it is the personal experience, the inner intention, that matters to the religious believer, and without some grasp of that intention, students will have no real understanding of religion' (Hay (ed.) 1990: 10). Hay implicitly equates modernity with the meta-narrative of naturalism, and believes that the turn to experience enables us to recover an authentic pre-modern understanding of religion. However, the tension between reason and experience, which provides the foundation upon which Hay constructs his entire religious pedagogy, is best seen not as a tension between modern and pre-modern forms of thought, but rather as a tension internal to modernity itself, between the meta-narratives of naturalism and romanticism. The notion that Christian doctrine expresses inner experience rather than describes the actual order-of-things does not constitute the recovery of an original Christian understanding; indeed such a view was virtually unknown prior to the emergence of liberal forms of Christianity in the modern era. In the patristic and medieval periods of Christianity the proclamation of the Christian creeds was always ¢rmly located in the liturgy and worship of the church: doxology and doctrine were inseparable, and the modern separation between knowledge and experience was unheard of. We have already noted the lack of any clear demarcation line between romanticism and post-modernity. Though the clear intention of romanticism

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was to invoke subjective experience as a means of establishing an objective relationship with the world, it became increasingly di¤cult to distinguish between the subjective and objective poles of such experience. This ambiguity was subsequently seized upon by post-modernity, which approached subjective experience as possessing ultimate value in itself, regardless of whether or not it relates to objective reality. The fact that romanticism struggles to sustain its objective truth claims means that it tends to merge into forms of post-modern subjectivity. Hence it comes as no surprise to ¢nd Clive and Jane Erricker reconstructing Hay's universal theology of experience in postmodern terms. They seek to cultivate children's openness to spiritual experience as a means of allowing them to create their own imaginary spiritual realities, rather than as a way of enabling them to relate to any ultimate reality (Erricker and Erricker 2000). We will return to this recon¢guring of learning-from religion within a post-modern anti-realistic paradigm in greater depth in the next chapter. In the meantime we must examine a number of criticisms of modern religious education's attempt to supplement learning-about religion with a process of learning-from religion. The ¢rst and most obvious criticism to be made is that the strategy of learning-from religion buys uncritically into the mind-set of modern romanticism. Just as romanticism rejected the rationalism endemic in the early stages of the Enlightenment in favour of the immediacy of moral, religious and aesthetic experience, so experiential religious education turns aside from the dry rationalistic process of learning religious facts in favour of an engagement with the religious emotions. In doing so it makes religious education dependent on the intellectual baggage of romanticism: its ideology of the self-su¤ciency of personal experience; its image of the autonomous and isolated self forced to turn inwards and rely on the authority of subjective experience; its dislocation of questions of value from the realistic order-ofthings; its dissociation of sense from sensibility and consequent turn to an unre£ective emotivism. The surface appearance of openness, derived from the distinction between the cultivation of a general capacity for spiritual experience and the induction of children into particular belief systems, disguises the fact that a clear and persistent ideology is at work here, an ideology all the more powerful for its initial invisibility. In e¡ect the process of learning-from religion enculturates children into the modernist world-view of romanticism. The second criticism to be made is that the cultivation of spiritual experience fails to empower children to think critically about religion. Concern for a depth and quality of religious insight takes second place to the stimulation of religious sensibility. This dissociation of sense and sensibility leads to the cultivation of spiritual desire untempered by informed critical re£ection. The resulting ideological assumption that our inner feelings are always right constitutes a recipe for a host of moral, aesthetic and spiritual transgressions.

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To encourage teenagers to follow their emotional instincts without the guidance of re£ective wisdom is to encourage them to place eros above agape and pursue personal relationships on the basis of the ful¢lment of their immediate desires rather than any moral re£ection on their duties and responsibilities towards others. In religious terms identifying spiritual authenticity with an intensity of feeling leads at best to a crass emotive pietism, at worst to a rampant fanaticism. This is not in any way to deny the value of spiritual experience or advocate a return to some barren rationalism, merely to suggest that intensity of feeling untempered by critical re£ection cannot properly function as a criterion for authenticity and truthfulness in the sphere of religion. However attractive the cultivation of spiritual experience in the classroom may appear ^ anecdotal evidence suggests that it is welcomed by many teachers and pupils ^ it will remain vacuous unless supplemented by teaching directed towards the cultivation of spiritual wisdom and insight, and to achieve the latter it is necessary to address parahistorical questions of ultimate truth on a rational as well as an experiential basis. A third criticism of the practice of learning-from religion is that the cultivation of spiritual experience bypasses questions of ultimate truth. Contemporary religious education is predicated on the modern distinction between fact and value: facts being that which science can identify, values being that which we are free to accept or reject as we please since they lie beyond the scope of reason. The location of religious doctrine in the domain of values re£ects the assumption that there is no way of adjudicating between the con£icting truth claims of religion. As a result religious belief is presented as a private a¡air that can have no legitimate place in the public sphere. Religious educators may teach phenomenological facts about the world's religions, but may not legitimately engage in any consideration of their ultimate truth claims. The problem here is that the vast majority of the world's religious traditions make truth claims about the ultimate order-of-things and in doing so reject any distinction between private belief and public truth. It follows that the embargo on exploring religious truth in the classroom, far from enhancing children's freedom, actually imposes a speci¢c understanding of religion ¢ltered through the mind-set of modernity. It is by no means clear that the lack of any common criteria for adjudicating between rival religious truth claims constitutes a valid reason for not engaging with them in the classroom. On the contrary, since disputes over questions of truth constitute the driving force of academic research across all domains of knowledge, there are good reasons for addressing questions of religious truth in schools. From a moral perspective the fact that religions o¡er con£icting claims about ultimate reality is all the more reason for addressing these issues in the classroom, since an education concerned to push disputed questions under the carpet rather than address them openly and honestly is at best ethically dubious.

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Freedom and tolerance What is the ultimate purpose of life? Soren Kierkegaard was prepared to sacri¢ce everything for the purity of heart that £ows from the beati¢c vision of God, and believed that only an education that strives for this, and this alone, is worth pursuing (Kierkegaard 1986). On the other hand John Locke adopted a far more pragmatic and down-to-earth view, content to accept a happy and useful existence in this life. Against this background the British Education Act of 1944 can be read on two levels: as an attempt to challenge society to respond to the truth claims of Christianity, or as an attempt to use the moral teachings of the church to support the reconstruction of society in the aftermath of the Second World War (UK Government 1944). This tension was re£ected in the classroom: the parables of Jesus in the Gospels could be taught either as theological stories proclaiming the eschatological immanence of the Kingdom of God, or as ethical narratives illustrative of common moral virtues. This tension between transcendence and immanence asks a fundamental question of the religious educator: to what extent is the recasting of religion as morality valid? With the advent of modern religious education the friction between transcendence and immanence was largely resolved in favour of the latter. As the truth claims of religion were progressively marginalised, so the public role of religious education became that of upholding public morality. As this process gathered pace, so the source of the moral dimension of religious education was signi¢cantly revised. No longer grounded in the Christian virtues embodied in the Ten Commandments and Sermon on the Mount, the moral agenda of religious education was re-envisaged on the basis of the liberal principles of freedom and tolerance. The teaching of world religions was to bring empathy, harmony and mutual understanding to a fragmented multicultural society. This approach was encapsulated in Education for All, a government-sponsored report on the education of children from minority ethnic groups. We believe that religious education can play a central role in preparing pupils for life in today's multi-racial Britain . . . challenging and countering the in£uence of racism in our society . . . the phenomenological approach to religious education re£ects most closely the aims underlying Education for All in laying the foundations for the kind of genuinely pluralist society which we envisaged at the opening of this report. (Swann Report 1985: 496) Religious education thus found itself called to the service of the third of our modern meta-narratives: liberalism. Teaching about the world's religions and encouraging children to adopt attitudes of tolerance and respect towards them would, it was assumed, help promote social harmony. This was no easy

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task: the story of the ongoing relationship between the world's religious traditions has not always been a particularly edifying one. As Paul Yates points out, `the history of religion is a story of con£ict and dissent, often bloody, as well as of striving for peace and reconciliation' (Yates 1988: 143). A key task for liberal religious educators was to ¢nd ways of dissipating the tension between the con£icting truth claims of the world's religions traditions. One strategy, adopted by John Hull, sets out to marginalise the exclusive truth claims of individual religious traditions by invoking a generic universal theology that deems religious traditions authentic only insofar as they espouse and celebrate our common humanity (Hull 1991). A second strategy, championed by Clive Erricker, seeks to undercut the particularity of religious truth claims by invoking a post-modern relativism in which con£icting doctrinal positions are dissolved into a plethora of private spiritualities: so long as there are as many religious positions as there are religious believers then the threat of religious particularity is e¡ectively nulli¢ed (Erricker and Erricker 2000). Both strategies, of a universalism that dissolves exclusivity into a greater whole and a nominalism that fragments exclusivity into its component parts, serve to undermine the distinctive ^ and supposedly totalitarian ^ truth claims made by speci¢c religious traditions. The problem with both strategies is that they work only by imposing alien constructions onto religious traditions committed to distinctiveness and particularity (D'Costa (ed.) 1990, D'Costa 2000). It is simply a brute fact that many religious traditions are non-liberal, both in their outlook on the world and in their historical origins. Islam, for example, is committed to a speci¢c and particular theological understanding of the order-of-things, and does not recognise the liberal distinction between the spheres of the public and the private: the will of Allah proclaimed in the Qur'an touches every aspect of reality, the public and political just as much as the private and domestic. To suggest that Islam is but one of a number of equally valid religious options, or that there is no such entity as `Islam', only the eclectic spirituality of individual Muslims, is to do intellectual, spiritual and theological violence to that tradition. Viewed in this light liberalism appears disconcertingly colonial and imperialistic, all too willing to usurp and misrepresent religious traditions in order to ful¢l its own moral agenda. Indeed, the argument can be taken a stage further: the paternalistic stance adopted by liberalism in assimilating non-liberal religious traditions within its preferred frame of reference actually threatens the very fabric of liberalism itself. Liberalism, that is to say, shifts from being an interim ethic designed to allow contrasting and con£icting world-views to co-exist without compromising their individual identities and integrities, into a closed and essentially relativistic meta-narrative. Graham Haydon has proposed that liberal education should discard a hard notion of liberalism as a comprehensive worldview committed to its own distinctive beliefs and morality, and embrace instead a soft notion of liberalism as an interim political ethic (Haydon

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1997). The implication is that aspects of liberalism have become, or at least are in danger of becoming, fossilised and rei¢ed into a dogmatic world-view. Liberal religious education, with its preference for political correctness over open debate whenever liberal values are perceived to be under threat, is guilty of embracing a narrowly conceived rhetoric of consensus. Haydon argues that if `education seems to be preaching toleration as one of the highest of virtues in its own right, it could well be charged with being, politically and religiously, sectarian . . . a society which tried to exclude anyone who was not a liberal in their moral outlook would be a markedly illiberal society' (127f ). Haydon's advocacy of a soft pragmatic version of liberalism allows him to `distinguish between encouraging people to show tolerance towards diversity and persuading people that tolerance is an ideal in itself ' (127). He suggests that `the liberal educator has to promote the values that are necessary to living in a liberal society, but [should] stop short of promoting a liberal set of moral beliefs or lifestyle' (128). Liberal education ought not to act paternalistically by imposing a liberal world-view, but rather ¢nd ways of protecting a pluralistic society in which non-liberals and liberals can co-exist. `Liberal educators need to distinguish between the liberal values that are necessary to maintaining a plural society (not because a plural society is necessarily the ideal, but because it is inescapably the kind of society we have) and the values that are themselves marks of a speci¢cally liberal response to moral issues' (127). Nicholas Wolterstor¡ has argued that this notion of liberalism as an open interim ethic rather than as a closed world-view is consistent with Locke's original liberal vision (Wolterstor¡ 1996). Locke's project, he suggests, set out to develop a `doxastic practice' in which communication and understanding between alternative and competing belief systems could be maximised. He was not concerned to create a uni¢ed world-view, merely to establish the conditions most likely to support the ongoing journey of humanity from ignorance to enlightenment. For Wolterstor¡ `it is to politics and not to epistemology that we have to look for an answer as to how to do that' (246). He seeks to rehabilitate Locke's project by recovering `its animating vision of a society in which persons of diverse traditions live together in justice and friendship, conversing with each other and slowly altering their traditions in response to their conversation' (246). Liberalism in its closed form sets itself up, however benignly, as a totalitarian regime that requires policing and protection in the face of threats posed by anti-liberal forces. Liberalism in its open form seeks to nurture the human quest for knowledge, wisdom and truth across contrasting and frequently con£icting world-views. The former places the liberal value of intoleranceof-the-intolerant centre stage; the latter highlights the principle of rational debate, turning to the repression of intolerance only as a ¢nal resort. A shift in the balance of power within religious education from hard to soft forms of

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liberalism represents both a viable option and an urgent necessity. So long as the current status quo remains, religious education will continue to induct children in a dogmatic liberal world-view. We have seen that modern religious education achieves legitimacy within ontemporary public education only by accommodating itself to modernity's three foundation meta-narratives. In the ¢rst place its accommodation with the meta-narrative of naturalism reduces religious and theological knowledge to the sum of the facts identi¢ed through a phenomenological description of immanent religious culture. Secondly, its accommodation with the meta-narrative of romanticism enables pupils' capacity for spiritual experience to be openly cultivated, but only on the condition that the relationship between such experience and realistic questions about the ultimate nature of reality are systematically avoided. Thirdly, accommodation with the metanarrative of liberalism shifts the focus of religious education from the intrinsic signi¢cance of religious truth claims to extrinsic concerns for the enhancement of the prevailing moral and political order. Two conclusions can be drawn from this: on the one hand modern religious education appears unlikely to be able to do justice to the self-understanding of the world's religious traditions in its present form; on the other, modern religious education's reliance on the meta-narratives of modernity would appear to leave it especially vulnerable to post-modern attacks. We will pick up the former point later in this book. In the next chapter we will explore attempts to deconstruct modern religious education and replace it with a post-modern religious education grounded in the anti-realism of post/pedagogy.

Chapter 15

Deconstructing religious education

This chapter examines attempts to deconstruct modern religious education and recast it within an anti-realistic framework. It will quickly become clear that the construction of a religious post/pedagogy does not constitute the major turnaround that might have been expected. This is because key aspects of the anti-realistic agenda have already been embraced by modern religious education: the transcendent truth claims of religion have been reduced to contingent aspects of immanent culture, spiritual experience dislocated from any realistic relationship with ultimate reality, and a relativistic ethic employed as a means of policing religious di¡erence. Rejecting the need to engage with questions of religious truth, modern religious education is content to allow children to construct their own spiritual realities, constrained only by the demand that they tolerate those constructions which di¡er from their own. In e¡ect it has allowed itself to be reduced to the instrumental role of enhancing spiritual freedom and nurturing cultural diversity, and as such is already well on its way to embracing post-modernity. This claim should not come as a complete surprise, since it resonates with our earlier suggestion that, just as romanticism is the a¡ective mirror-image of Enlightenment rationalism, so post-modernity constitutes the nominalistic mirror-image of romantic essentialism. The path from the romantic recognition of the signi¢cance of subjective experience to the post-modern celebration of our freedom to create the reality we desire is not a particularly arduous route to travel. Given the way inner experience functions as a key driver of modern religious education it comes as no surprise to ¢nd it slipping, with apparent ease and increasing frequency, into forms of post-modern anti-realism. There is, at the end of the day, not that much for postmodernity to deconstruct: modern religious education already contains within itself the seeds of a religious post/pedagogy.

Contextual religious education We begin with an examination of contextual approaches to religious education that, despite locating themselves ¢rmly in a modernist paradigm,

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nevertheless £irt with anti-realistic modes of thought. Towards Religious Competence: Diversity as a Challenge for Education in Europe is the product of a network of religious educators seeking to respond to the challenge of religious pluralism (Heimbrock et al. (eds) 2001). Despite the inevitable diversity of perspectives on o¡er in a collection of essays such as this, it is possible to identify a uni¢ed and coherent vision across many ^ though certainly not all ^ of the contributions. This vision embraces two core concerns: religious context and religious competence. Contextual religious education proceeds from the immediate cultural context of students and focuses on their negotiation of identity at local level. It suggests that the appropriate response to the challenge of pluralism is to replace the transmission of knowledge with a more deliberately productive pedagogy designed to transform religious identity. This strategy seeks to avoid the rei¢ed attempts to identify the `essence' of religion in general, and of speci¢c religious traditions in particular, thereby e¡ectively by-passing `the problems of the long standing myths about mono-cultural and monoreligious homogeneity' (13). Such academic abstractions are taken to be both intellectually dubious and existentially irrelevant. `A contextual approach to RE focuses on the concrete and the particular, and less on the abstract and general. It focuses on religious life and less on religious doctrine' (55). The accompanying notion of religious competence adopts a holistic model of human development. It is not the task of teachers to transmit the fruits of academic research into the nature and essence of religion, but rather to encourage the pupil to respond to religious diversity by negotiating his or her own distinctive sense of spiritual identity. Hence one of the key questions posed at the outset: `What is needed if we take seriously into account the constructive responsibility and the role of the subject as his/her owner of the formative process?' (9). The negotiation of religious meaning requires religious competence, and it is the nurturing of such competence that emerges as the core aim of contextual religious education. `Religious competence means being able to deal with one's own religiosity and its various dimensions embedded in the dynamics of life-history in a responsible way but also to appreciate the religious view of others' (9). The richness of the contextual understanding of identity presented in Heimbrock et al.'s volume, developed on the basis of both philosophical re£ection and empirical investigation, certainly illuminates the reality of children's life-worlds and sheds light on the diverse manifestations of religion at the local level. However, if the book is to be read as a programmatic defence of a new religious pedagogy then it is necessary to articulate a number of reservations. It is clear that the collection tends towards an anthropological reading that reduces religion to a dimension of culture (87). Most philosophers and theologians would wish to supplement such anthropological perspectives

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with philosophical and theological ones. However, apart from the occasional reminder that this dimension should not be ignored, there is little discussion of religion with reference to those metaphysical, ontological and theological concerns that transcend `mere' culture. The human sciences, in particular ethnography, are clearly privileged over the disciplines of theology and philosophy. As a result the horizontal dimension of religion as a cultural phenomenon is allowed to eclipse the vertical dimension of religion concerned with questions of transcendence and ultimate truth. Indeed we are told categorically at one point that humans `do not strive for the ¢nal truth about the world (except in special practices such as science), but are content with satisfying meanings, those that enable them to act in a satisfying manner in a given situation' (28). This pragmatic turn is linked to the claim that the `European Enlightenment view of ``religions'' as discrete belief systems should be abandoned in favour of a much looser portrayal of religious traditions and groupings' (35). Contextual religious education is presented as a response to `a paradigmatic shift in the theory of religious education and the scienti¢c study of religion in general which, inspired by phenomenological philosophy, has re-focused its attention to the life-world(s) as origin and locus of religion' (129). There is space here to voice only four objections to this cluster of assumptions. The ¢rst is to suggest that the familiar argument that the Enlightenment must carry primary responsibility for reifying religion into distinctive belief systems, and that prior to the dawn of the modern era religion constituted little more than a loose cluster of individual spiritualities, is simply not sustainable. The second is to note that the vertical dimension of religion ^ the fact that, in phenomenological terms, the distinctively `religious' dimension of any given phenomenon lies in its orientation or intentionality towards transcendence ^ cannot be dismissed as lightly as contextual religious educators suppose. The third objection focuses on the unmistakable synergy between the reduction of religion to a contingent aspect of local culture and the outlook of anti-realistic philosophy: the nominalistic turn to the local and particular at the expense of the general and universal is a distinctive feature of postmodernism. Religious educators are now all too familiar with the dangers of cultural imperialism and, though many of the contributors clearly recognise the danger of imposing modernist assumptions onto our understanding of religion, few take time to consider the possibility that their implicitly postmodern sensibilities might lead them into a similar trap. Further, the postmodern epistemological assumption that there is no realistic universal truth out there for us to discover, and that consequently we must create our own local truths, appears remarkably similar to the suggestion that children should develop the competence to negotiate their own religious identities rather than engage in the pursuit of religious truth. The implication that

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children's untutored `understanding' of traditional manifestations of religion should be normative for religious education suggests a post-modern pedagogy in which children are expected to do no more than renegotiate their identities in the light of their contact with a range of alternative life-style options. This is all the more disconcerting given the evidence that the normative religious life of contemporary Europe increasingly appears to be distinctly abnormal: as Grace Davie points out, the fragmentation of organised religion is largely, though not exclusively, a pan-European phenomenon that is not generally re£ected on a global scale (Davie 2000). One of the problems of starting with the immediate context of the pupil is that, if this context is not itself quali¢ed by further contextualisation, the local quickly gets mistaken as representative of the universal. Davie identi¢es the loss of shared religious memory as a particular danger facing European civilisation at the present time: rather than o¡ering ways of engaging with this mutating memory, contextual religious education appears committed to the strategy of approving and perpetuating the dissolution of institutional religion across Europe. Our fourth and ¢nal objection concerns the purpose of education: many contributors simply assume, without further discussion, that religion should be utilised as an instrument of social and personal development, rather than approached as an entity worthy of study in its own right. We are told that a normative task of public education is to `make young people competent to handle plurality in an appropriate responsible way' (Heimbrock et al. (eds) 2001: 86). Such competence is, generally speaking, understood in pragmatic terms: the competence to generate a well-rounded character capable of contributing positively to the well being of society. Religious education appears to be little more than a useful vehicle through which this task may be achieved. No longer possessing any intrinsic value, no longer concerned to grapple with ultimate questions of meaning and truth that no other subject discipline is capable of handling, religious education is reduced to the instrumental role of buttressing the normative values of pan-European culture. If this is the case, and if religion is no more than a contingent and relativistic dimension of culture, one has to ask why religious education as a distinct discipline needs to exist at all. Why not a general programme of cultural studies? By bracketing out the transcendent aspects of religion contextual religious education e¡ectively destroys the hermeneutical circle through which the local is interpreted in the light of the universal, and the universal in the light of the local. A religious education with access only to the local is necessarily an impoverished education. Until such time as contextual religious education extends its programme to examine these religious and educational questions in greater depth, it is di¤cult to avoid the conclusion that it embraces, albeit by default, a pragmatic anti-realistic agenda.

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Calling the post-modern tune We turn now to a case study of one explicit attempt to reconstruct religious education within a post/pedagogical paradigm: the work of the British educators Clive and Jane Erricker. Their programmatic position is usefully summarised in a paper published by Clive in the journal Religious Education. `Shall we Dance?' presents his personal vision of a radical anti-realistic spiritual pedagogy (Erricker 2001, cf. Erricker and Erricker 2000, Wright 2001). Erricker's proposals are, as he is happy to acknowledge, radical, dissenting and dangerous. Their implementation would bring about the end of religious education as we know it: knowledge would be dislocated from reality, understanding equated with unconstrained imagination, religion reduced to solipsistic experience, and education limited to the role of stimulating private desire. Erricker writes with an evangelical enthusiasm, inviting us to join him on his chosen intellectual and moral high ground. There is little in his style that resonates with the tone of ironic di¤dence adopted by Derrida and other self-consciously post-modern writers. Where Derrida is aware that any positive statement he makes must immediately be placed `under erasure' and made the subject of further deconstruction, Erricker presents himself as an apologist for a speci¢c anti-realistic meta-narrative. His claim to have identi¢ed the actual (non-realistic) order-of-things breaks his own cardinal rule that all world-views are inherently unstable. In striving to emancipate spiritual education from the modern frying pan he inadvertently casts it into an authoritarian post-modern ¢re. As we have already seen, during the second half of the last century British religious education freed itself from a narrowly conceived Christian confessionalism and established in its place a modern pedagogy designed to be open to the challenges posed by religious pluralism and cultural diversity. When read in this historical context Erricker's attempt to impose a closed anti-realistic ideology on education reveals itself as reactionary rather than radical: it opens the door to a resurgent confessionalism, understood as the induction of children into a single nonnegotiable world-view, albeit now in a post-modern rather than a traditional Christian guise. Erricker points out that knowledge `is always situated in particular political contexts and within political structures and climates' (5). This implicitly challenges Descartes' modernist strategy of establishing universal knowledge by freeing the human subject, via a hermeneutic of systematic doubt, from the prejudicial authority of tradition, culture and politics. Erricker unpacks this contrast between local and universal knowledge in terms of a stark either/or choice: either knowledge is rooted in a `metaphysic of presence' that, given the assumption that the object of knowledge presents itself before the gaze of the observer in unmediated form, enables us to construct an

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ultimate picture of reality; or else knowledge is always mediated, and consequently fundamentally distorted and undermined, by a range of authoritarian systems and power-structures. Erricker's choice between the two is a predictable one: since we have no access to absolutely certain knowledge it follows that we must abandon universal knowledge as a human aspiration and make do with the merely local. It is children's freedom to choose whatever local beliefs and life-style choices they prefer that emancipates them from the power-structures that envelop knowledge. Erricker approaches the problem of knowledge without any attempt to engage in dialogue with critical realists who, whilst joining him in recognising the intimate relationship between knowledge and power, draw very different conclusions to his own. Consequently he fails to address the possibility of a contingent rationality through which knowledge, however provisional and open to revision, is obtainable precisely because we are inheritors of intellectual traditions whose power-structures are open to critical scrutiny. Erricker's strategy of simply a¤rming his preferred post-modern position without any attempt to justify it in the face of sustained intellectual opposition leaves him vulnerable to the twin charges of sophistry and authoritarianism. Despite his claim to have deconstructed knowledge, Erricker presents a remarkably clear and precise understanding of the nature of language. Language, he contends, constitutes a ¢gurative mode of discourse whose only legitimate reference is to the web of language itself, never to any external reality. Erricker here adopts a broadly Kantian framework which he then radicalises by denying the possibility of any path from the realm of linguistic appearances to the world as-it-is-in-itself. Because words cannot connect with reality we must play the never-ending game of constructing imaginary linguistic worlds on the basis of our personal desires, preferences and inclinations. This appears to run counter to common sense: if Erricker is right we would not be able to perform open heart surgery or walk on the moon. His chosen logic is once again that of mere a¤rmation: without justi¢cation linguistic solipsism is privileged over a range of critical and realistic alternatives familiar to students of contemporary linguistic philosophy. At the heart of the problem is Erricker's refusal to di¡erentiate absolute and contingent knowledge: though we cannot have a godlike understanding of ultimate reality ^ such a view is the preserve of religious and secular fundamentalists ^ it is not clear why this should preclude us from developing provisional linguistic models of reality which claim legitimacy on the grounds of their convergence with a realistic world beyond the ¢ctions of our imagination. Erricker's deconstruction of knowledge takes one ¢nal mesmerising antirealistic turn: ultimately we fail to obtain knowledge of reality because, at the end of the day, there is no such thing as reality, no actual order-of-things. The notion of `reality' exists only within our psychological conventions and linguistic constructions. Erricker here falls into the epistemic fallacy of confusing reality with our knowledge of reality. This, as we have already

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seen, is the same fallacy that the logical positivists embraced in seeking to limit the world to the sum total of veri¢able sense experience. It is procrustean in the extreme to deny the reality of the universe simply because it is beyond our intellectual powers to fully comprehend it. Erricker's positivistic anti-realism is sharply at odds with those post-modern thinkers, preeminently Derrida himself, who insist on the need to remain agnostic about `reality' on the grounds that our language is incapable of properly engaging with it. Erricker's unquali¢ed certainty regarding the non-being of reality breaks his own rules, which insist that we do not have access to any such absolute knowledge. Erricker's primarily negative stance should not be allowed to disguise the positive world-view he puts forward: he a¤rms that the true order of things is that which we create through our language games, a world constrained only by the limitations of our creative imagination. He constructs a metanarrative of absolute freedom, grounded in a non-realistic world-view in which our linguistic ¢ctions are always legitimate, always correct. In doing so he forgets that the actuality of the world beyond our imagination ^ objects and ideas, time and place, friends and enemies, pleasure and pain ^ inevitably and irrevocably intrude upon our lives. It is impossible to ignore the brute fact of the way things actually are in the world: one can no more deny the reality of cancer than one can imagine away the reality of death itself. As MacIntyre observes, only `in fantasy do we live what story we please. In life . . . we are always under certain constraints' (quoted in Lundin et al. 1999: 4). In placing everything under the authority of his creative ¢ctions Erricker grants himself arbitrary and absolute power over his fellow human beings: since other people are simply ¢gments of his post-modern imagination, presumably he is free to do as he likes with them, regardless of any moral claims they might make of him. Erricker thus ¢nds himself enveloped by the very power-structures he sought to free himself from.

Anti-realism and religious understanding The next target in Erricker's deconstructive sights is religion. He claims that the phenomenological description of religion has resulted, at least amongst some British religious educators, in the construction of an essentialist view of religion as a set of idealised orthodox traditions: Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity and so forth. He argues that such representations do not provide authentic pictures of religious reality, but rather function within the religious and political establishments as means of social control. In supporting his position Erricker draws attention to Bob Jackson's ethnographic research, which has revealed signi¢cant levels of disparity between essentialist representations of religious traditions and the frequently eclectic and heterodox world-views of their adherents ( Jackson 1997). However, it is by no means clear that the representation of religion follows the simplistic course implied

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by Erricker. His position is dependent on a nominalism that regards the relationship between language and reality as arbitrary, and as a result views speci¢c religious traditions as rei¢ed intellectual constructs. This leads him to conclude that the only religious realities that can be properly spoken of are the eclectic and particular spiritual perspectives of individual believers. Scholars of religion, however, have found the identi¢cation of distinctive religious traditions to be an important aspect of the investigation of religion. It appears to be quite possible to identify and describe speci¢c religious traditions without falling into the trap of reifying and essentialising them. Despite the rich diversity of Islam, and the plurality of ways in which individual Muslims may elect to appropriate their Islamic identities, the labels `Islam' and `Muslim' constitute entirely valid heuristic tools that re£ect the reality of the phenomena of Islam. This is not to deny the ethnographic diversity identi¢ed by Jackson, but it is to claim that generally speaking those we label `Muslim' embrace a world-view that is distinctive in relationship, for example, to those we label `Jewish' and `Christian'. Erricker's rejection of this position leads him into three remarkable leaps of reason. The ¢rst of these leaps is to present us, once again, with a crude either/or: either we must adopt an essentialist depiction of religion, or we must embrace a nominalism in which the concept `religion' is deconstructed, leaving only the private world-views of individual believers. The logic of this choice, which appears to rub against the grain of common sense, is not particularly clear. It is surely possible, as we have already intimated, to identify individual Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus without being forced to accept that, should they prove to be less than ideal representatives of their traditions, the labels `Muslim', `Sikh' and `Hindu' must be rejected as worthless distortions. Our language does not operate in such a simplistic black-or-white fashion: it is quite possible to describe the common traits and family resemblances between adherents of a religious tradition without falling into the essentialist trap. Erricker's nominalism, with its commitment to Cartesian certainty and the Ockham's razor of simplicity, needs replacing with an acknowledgement of the contingency of understanding, and a recognition of the need to develop a varied and di¡erentiated religious vocabulary appropriate to the richness and complexity of religion itself. Erricker's second leap of reason is to deny the possibility of progress in the study of religion: `this continual shift in the object and method of study . . . is not a progressive re¢nement of the understanding of the object of study' (Erricker 2001: 8). Though Erricker does not elaborate on his understanding of `progress' he appears to have in mind some form of quasi-Hegelian eschatology, in which human understanding develops in linear and dialectical fashion towards an absolute and ¢nal understanding of reality. Though such a view was certainly present in some aspects of the evolutionary thinking of the nineteenth century, it is certainly atypical of contemporary religious scholarship. In any case it is far from clear why the rejection of such an

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in£ated view of human intellectual progress should disqualify us from accepting that some descriptions of religion may be more adequate to the task they set themselves than others. The recognition that ethnographic descriptions of religious communities have made signi¢cant contributions to our religious understanding ^ which they surely have ^ does not demand the conclusion that the most recent scholarly research necessarily constitutes an advance on what has gone before. In all of this Erricker once again breaks his own rules: in setting out to deconstruct `religion' he privileges nominalistic representations of religion, and in so doing implies that he has made irrevocable progress in understanding religion. Erricker's third leap of reason is to claim that there is no such thing as `religion': since there can be no absolute knowledge of the essence of religion, it follows that the concept itself is no more than an erroneous ¢ction projected from the solipsistic world of linguistic appearances. Religious discourse is here reduced to a self-referential construction imposed by adherents of religious communities: `religion itself is simply a construct that we erroneously place upon appearances to conform them to our own pattern of order' (8f ). Captivated by Descartes' assertion that the only valid knowledge is absolutely certain knowledge, Erricker is drawn to the patently false conclusion that, since we are unable to identify the essence of religion, it follows that there is no such thing as religion. The logic is that the disciplines of theology and religious studies will cease to exist within the post-modern academy, since they no longer possess any proper object of study. Indeed, the postmodern academy itself will become redundant, since there is no longer any `reality' for any of the academic disciplines to engage with: bad news, this, for those of us who rely on medical schools to train the doctors who provide us with health care, though presumably welcome news to an advertising industry skilled in procuring the only human good Erricker appears to recognise, viz. the manipulation and stimulation of our untutored desires. Erricker's hermeneutical strategies are grounded in a radical readerresponse theory. Understanding is no longer based on our engagement with a reality that stands beyond our immediate experience: on the contrary, it is restricted to the construction of poetic ¢ctions on the basis of imagination, desire and personal preference. Experience of the world we indwell has nothing to teach us, since `tradition and identity are selective constructions of the past made in the present' (14). The traces of history make no claims on us: they are simply disposable edi¢ces that we may use, if we so desire, as the raw material from which to select `what sort of relationships we want to construct; what values we seek to espouse' (9). Erricker uses the example of photography, arguing that pictures of the past should be appropriated aesthetically as a means of stimulating the creative imagination, any knowledge of historical situation they depict being ultimately redundant. There are a number of criticisms to be made of Erricker's hermeneutical stance.

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Firstly, Erricker privileges, without any discussion or attempt at justi¢cation, one speci¢c school of hermeneutical thought. There is no attempt at a critical engagement with the mainstream post-Enlightenment hermeneutical tradition that runs from Schleiermacher through to Gadamer, Habermas and Ricoeur. The key hermeneutical issue addressed by this tradition, that of the relationship between the horizon of the interpreter and the horizon of the object of interpretation, is reduced to the question of the self-understanding of the interpreter isolated from any external object of interpretation. Secondly, his denial that history has anything of value to teach us is rooted in the belief that historians are necessarily essentialist, concerned to provide us with an ultimate and ¢nal meta-narrative of the past. Such a characterisation misrepresents the self-understanding the vast majority of academic historians hold of their intellectual and moral responsibilities: they are aware of the limitations of the evidence available to them; aware of the need to attend to the voices of the historically dispossessed; aware of problems of power, bias and prejudice; aware of the contingent nature of historical reporting; and aware that historiography frequently leads to alternative accounts ^ sometimes mutually exclusive, sometimes complementary ^ of the same historical events. Thirdly, Erricker's position lacks moral substance. There is something profoundly disturbing in the implication that photographic images of the Holocaust should be appropriated as a means of enhancing and stimulating our private imaginary worlds, rather than engaged with as witnesses to a historical reality. The contention that we can have no historical knowledge of the Shoah is counter to common sense, runs the danger of legitimating Holocaust denial, and e¡ectively silences the voices of those who demand to be remembered. The silent witness of the photographic images at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem provides the dispossessed of the Holocaust with `a monument and a name better than sons and daughters', and demands a hermeneutic in which understanding is inseparable from moral obligation (Isaiah 56:5). The recognition of the Other constitutes a necessary ethical cornerstone of hermeneutics: `the selfhood of oneself implies otherness to such an intimate degree that one cannot be thought of without the other' (Ricoeur 1992: 3).

Religious education and economies of power Erricker considers religious and spiritual pedagogy in the context of the statesponsored education system of England and Wales. He argues that its development has been shaped by a complex interplay of social, academic and political forces: the pragmatics of the representational power of particular ethnic and faith groups within the nation, post-colonialism, factional dispute within the Christian churches, class, race, the political establishment and so forth. As a result education provision is rooted in a compromise between a variety of political forces. We can certainly agree with Erricker

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that religious education is inevitably a political a¡air, and will always be intricately related to a network of power-structures; the alternative of an idealised and value-free pedagogy that somehow £oats free from the necessary limitations of culture is not a serious option. The issue is not the existence of power-structures, but the way in which educators deal with them. Erricker suggests that religious education in Britain is concerned with the preservation of a conceptual representation of the order-of-things in an attempt to maintain the traditional values of society. Though the political power struggle is indeed complex, it seems to me that Erricker pushes his argument one stage too far in suggesting that the forces of conservatism have been victorious in this particular context. The problem here lies partly in a failure to di¡erentiate between these forces, none of which enjoys an absolute ascendancy: the pluralistic `theology' of the Labour-controlled Department for Education and Skills is signi¢cantly at variance with that of right-wing advocates of an education for `Christian citizenship' associated with radical thinkers within the Conservative opposition party (though this is certainly not part of o¤cial Conservative policy), which in turn is clearly distinguishable from that of many members of `orthodox' religious communities opposed to the theological universalism inherent in much classroom practice. Further, Erricker fails to acknowledge that in the academy, and at the local level of many individual classroom teachers, power and in£uence are generally in the hands of the forces of liberalism, exempli¢ed by the generally progressive stance adopted by many members of the politically active Association of University Lecturers in Religion and Education (AULRE). There is clearly a need to address the issue of the concrete reality of the system Erricker is so keen to undermine. The question here is not whether political power struggles are actually taking place, since it would be naive in the extreme to assume otherwise, but rather the extent to which they have resulted in the imposition of a conservative traditionalism at the expense of alternative voices. Though the British system of religious education is far from perfect, it can be argued that it has gone further than Erricker is willing to concede in seeking to address the concerns of religious minorities. In the ¢rst place the state sponsors a dual system of education, supporting ordinary county schools as well as voluntary schools operated by religious communities. The latter category is not limited to schools administered by the established Anglican church, but extends to those run by a number of religious traditions. Indeed, the policy of the present Labour administration is to expand the range and number of these faith community schools: since the 1997 general election Greek Orthodox, Jewish, Muslim, Seventh Day Adventist and Sikh schools have been given voluntary-aided status. Secondly legislation respects the right of any voluntary school with a religious foundation to teach according to the wishes of the particular religious community it represents. Non-religious county schools are under a legal obligation to o¡er a religious education that, whilst re£ecting the fact that Christianity is

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historically the major religious tradition in the country, has a statutory duty to take account of other religious traditions represented within the local community. It is illegal for county schools to teach religious education from a purely Christian perspective, and o¤cial guidance, in the form of the Schools Curriculum and Assessment Authority model syllabuses gives weight to Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism and Sikhism alongside Christianity (Schools Curriculum and Assessment Authority 1994). Thirdly county schools must teach according to a local agreed syllabus, developed through negotiation between four constituencies: teachers, local politicians, the established Anglican church and representatives of other religious traditions present in the local community. They function as equal partners: the established church does not have a right of veto. And ¢nally there are conscience clauses that give teachers the right to withdraw themselves, and parents their children, from religious education without recrimination. The conclusion to draw from this is that although it is undoubtedly true that contemporary British religious education is wrapped up in a range of ideologies and powerstructures, there remains a signi¢cant level of diversity that keeps open the possibility of minority voices gaining at least some sort of a hearing. What then of spiritual education, which Erricker seeks to free from the shackles of religious education? E¡ective spiritual education, he argues, `cannot derive from prescribed content determined by what we think the learner ought to know, according to authorities in discrete disciplines or political arbiters of what should constitute national culture' (Erricker 2001: 19). It is, however, by no means clear that such a `prescribed content' of spiritual education actually exists. The 1988 Education Reform Act adopted a minimalist approach to spiritual education: schools must o¡er a balanced and broadly based curriculum in such a way that it `promotes the spiritual, moral, cultural, mental and physical development of pupils at the school and of society' (UK Government 1988: 1). The legislation goes no further than this. Government advice on the implementation of spiritual education deliberately disengages spiritual education from religious education, presenting spirituality as a crosscurricular theme that should permeate the life of the whole school (Schools Curriculum and Assessment Authority 1995). Beyond this it o¡ers no more than a generalised account of spirituality: spirituality is fundamental to the human condition, transcending ordinary everyday experience and concerned with the search for identity and meaning in response to death, su¡ering, beauty and evil; it may be encountered in our beliefs, sense of awe, wonder and mystery, feelings of transcendence, search for meaning and purpose, selfknowledge, relationships, creativity, feelings and emotions; it is rooted in curiosity, imagination, insight and intuition. Such a broad non-committal description of spirituality cannot, by any stretch of the imagination, be described as `prescriptive': it clearly leaves room for educative engagement with a broad range of speci¢c spiritual traditions, both religious and secular.

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The speci¢c interpretation and provision for spiritual education is left to individual schools to determine: school inspectors from the O¤ce for Standards in Education are required to report only on the provision a school makes for pupils' spiritual development, not on its e¡ectiveness or material content. It is in the nature of things that government-sponsored education will inevitably tend to favour the establishment. What is notable about the British situation is the extent to which the system actively strives to ensure that minority voices are not dispossessed, though this is not to claim that the situation is perfect, or to deny that there is much work still to be done. It may well be the case, however, that authentic freedom is to be found not in a vacuous post-modern freedom from constraint, but rather in an educative freedom for engagement with substantial religious and spiritual issues. In this chapter we argued that modern contextual forms of religious education have already begun to £irt with anti-realistic approaches to the subject, and explored Erricker's attempt to establish an explicitly anti-realistic framework for the subject. The inconsistencies and contradictions identi¢ed above suggest that anti-realistic religious education is likely to achieve little more than the induction of children into an anti-realistic world-view. We have already seen that whenever post-modernism allows itself to be transformed into just another modernist meta-narrative it needs to be deconstructed. Beyond the impasse of modern absolutism and post-modern relativism lies the possibility of a humble, mature and re£ective striving for wisdom that willingly places itself under the authority, not of the ¢ctions of our imagination, nor of the authoritarian claims of political pressure groups, but of the truth inherent in the order-of-things. This requires a critical education that transcends both modern and post-modern forms of religious confessionalism. There is no short cut to mature religious literacy and sensibility; hence the task of the ¢nal two chapters of this book is to outline the contours of a critical religious education by drawing on both the post-modern philosophy of di¡erence and the insights of critical realism.

Chapter 16

Transcendence and transformation

In the previous two chapters we have seen how religious education has been colonised by a series of modern and post-modern meta-narratives, and in the process reduced to a supporting role within general programmes of personal and social education. In response to this situation the concluding two chapters will sketch the contours of a critical religious education rooted in the intrinsic pedagogical value of its subject matter ^ an approach drawing inspiration in equal measure from the post-modern philosophy of di¡erence and the insights of critical realism. We begin by investigating the potentially transformational role of a religious pedagogy driven by the post-modern commitment to alterity, one concerned primarily with questions of transcendence and ultimate truth.

Religion and transcendence How might the post-modern philosophy of di¡erence impact on religious education? Throughout this study modernity has been characterised as the secular rejection of religious transcendence in favour of an immanent humanistic world-view, driven at least in part by a fear of the unknown, and of powerlessness in the face of a threatened descent into nihilistic chaos. These concerns are encapsulated in the images of Descartes' despotic demon and Ockham's transcendent deity ordering human destiny in a manner totally beyond our comprehension and control. The turn to immanence, to the bedrock of the natural world, human experience and social contract, promised a secure world of order and meaning ¢rmly under human command. Modernity, that is to say, is predicated on the rejection of alterity and di¡erence, and as such is able to embrace only a domesticated and privatised theology of sameness. Despite its much-heralded rejection of modernity, the philosophy of anti-realism makes a similar move. Once the fruits of modernity were equated with rei¢ed, alienating and totalitarian intellectual constructions and political structures, so the same fears that drove modernity ^ of the unknown, of powerlessness and of the threat of nihilism ^ led to the antirealistic strategy of deconstructing meaning in order to free the individual to

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create his or her own arbitrary reality without fear of any external constraint. Anti-realism, like modernity before it, resists alterity and retreats from the gaze of the Other. Neither has time for Levinas' turn from sameness to otherness in search of an open horizon of meaning capable of engendering a sense of awe and wonder in the face of the ultimate mystery of the universe, and neither is willing to transgress beyond its familiar home ground and risk trespassing on the sacred spaces of di¡erence. The yearning for the comfort-zone of a safe, secure and protected environment appears to be an intrinsic part of our human make-up, as is the propensity to seek premature closure on such yearnings: fearful of the unknown, we are quick to resign ourselves to accept the familiar rather than risk opening ourselves to the unfamiliar (Wright 1991: 65¡ ). The critical philosophy of religious education defended here seeks to turn pupils into just such discontented philosophers. It is not a pedagogy of the status quo, but a transformative pedagogy concerned to bring about genuine and lasting change in children's lives by opening up alternative horizons of meaning and engineering encounters with alterity, otherness and di¡erence. It goes without saying that the vulnerability of pupils engaged in such a process must be recognised and respected, and that the safety of a secure learning environment is indispensable. Nevertheless a transformative education cannot possibly avoid being a risky and challenging process, indeed on occasions possibly even an uncomfortable and disconcerting one: `no pain no gain' as the adage goes, no transformation without struggle. If the pursuit of truth constitutes a risky undertaking, how much more the religious pursuit of ultimate truth. However if the challenge is great, so are the potential rewards. Critical religious education sets out to gift students the possibility of viewing our mundane and all-too-human comedy of errors sub specie aeternitatis ^ as part of potentially profound divina commedia. How might religion open up new horizons of meaning in the classroom? Rudolph Otto's classic study of the phenomenon of religious experience, The Idea of the Holy, points us towards an answer (Otto 1931). De¢ning religious experience as experience of the holy, and in the process distinguishing nonrational experience from rational concepts and ideas, he sets out to explore key aspects of what he terms the `numinous'. We encounter transcendence as an awe-inspiring mystery (mysterium tremendum), an overwhelming sense of power and majesty (majestas) that invokes fear in the face of what is a fascinating mystery (mysterium fascinans). Such fear is rooted in the fact that we ¢nd ourselves face-to-face with ultimate reality, the perfect fullness of Being, the wholly Other. Otto's study had a deep in£uence on the work of Mircea Eliade, providing the basis for his distinction between the sacred and the profane, between immanent and transcendent responses to the mystery of life. In archaic pre-modern societies, he argues, human beings were essentially homo religious, striving to live as far as possible in the realm of the sacred. `Man becomes aware of the sacred because it manifests itself, shows itself, as

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something wholly di¡erent from the profane' (Eliade 1987: 11). He describes `hierophany' as the act of manifestation of the sacred, the means through which the sacred reveals itself to humanity, and views the history of religions as the history of such hierophanies. From the most elementary animism, in which the sacred manifests itself in ordinary objects such as stones or trees, through to the most developed religious systems, such as the Christian belief in the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ, the sacred manifests itself in and through profane realities. `In each case we are confronted by the same mysterious act ^ the manifestation of something of a wholly di¡erent order, a reality that does not belong to our world, in objects that are an integrated part of our natural ``profane'' world' (11). The entire profane cosmos, including the natural, social and experiential realms, is capable of manifesting the sacred, of transforming profane space and time into sacred space and time. For both Otto and Eliade such religious experience is rooted in a reality beyond the natural world. Otto insists on the a priori nature of the numinous: it is not the product of human psychology, since we do not have the capacity to produce such experience for ourselves; rather it breaks in and forces itself upon us, as it were, `from above' (Otto 1931: 179¡ ). Though human beings possess a universal predisposition towards the holy, unpacked by Otto in terms of a faculty of receptivity and the twin responses of acknowledgement and judgement, they do not have the capacity to produce or generate experience of the holy for themselves (181). There are some outstanding individuals, however, who ¢nd themselves in possession of a higher endowment that o¡ers unique access to religious experience. Such an endowment is not derived from the general human predisposition towards such experience; on the contrary it di¡ers from it in both quality and degree. Just as the artist, as opposed to the connoisseur of art, receives the gift of the production and revelation of art from above, so the prophet plays a similar role in the domain of religious consciousness, production and revelation. The prophet `is the man in whom the Spirit shows itself alike as the power to hear the ``voice within'' and the power of divination, and in each case appears as a creative force' (182). The general human predisposition for religious experience is secondary to the primary experience of the prophet: most people experience the holy in the form of a secondary rekindling ^ stimulated through, for example, institutionalised and formalised acts of prayer and worship ^ of the primary experience of the prophet. Otto goes on to identify a still higher level of revelation, a qualitatively di¡erent stage `as underivable from the prophet as was his from that of common men' (182). `We can look, beyond the prophet, to one in whom is found the Spirit in all its plenitude, and who at the same time in his person and in his performance is become most completely the object of divination, in whom Holiness is recognized apparent' (182). Otto's clear allusion to the Christian doctrine of incarnation need not retain our attention here, since of greater signi¢cance for the present

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discussion is his clear linking of religious experience with the theological concept of revelation: religious experience is not self-generating, but rather responds to the active revelation of some greater transcendent reality. Similarly for Eliade the sacred constitutes a reality above and beyond the profane givenness of the ordinary world: `the sacred always manifests itself as a reality of a wholly di¡erent order from ``natural'' realities', and as a result the `polarity sacred^profane is often expressed as an opposition between real and unreal or pseudo-real' (Eliade 1987: 10, 12f ). Though the sacred manifests itself in and through objects that are an integral part of the natural world it is of a wholly di¡erent order: the sacred is saturated with being, founds and grounds the profane world, gives life its orientation and meaning, possesses e¤cacy, is an active property of things, and, in the last analysis, constitutes an actual reality that does not belong to our world (12). It is the reality of the sacred that drives the religious impulse: `religious man deeply desires to be, to participate in reality, to be saturated with power' (13). Though Eliade recognises that archaic cultures did not possess the philosophical language to enable the sacred to be labelled as `real', `true', or `actual' he is nevertheless clear that for pre-modern cultures the sacred constituted the ontological bed-rock of reality. This ontological grounding of reality in the sacred contrasts sharply with the ontological bed-rock acknowledged by the profane world of modernity: viz. the natural world, human experience and social contract. Hence it comes as no surprise to discover that the `modern Occidental experiences a certain uneasiness before many manifestations of the sacred' (11). At the end of the day religion grounds reality not in the modernist bed-rock of the natural and human realms, nor in the post-modern bed-rock of the realm of absolute freedom, but rather in the religious bed-rock of the sacred, the transcendent, the numinous ^ that enchanted realm that stands over against the disenchanted world constructed by the Enlightenment. The signi¢cance of the work of Otto and Eliade for the present discussion lies in their recognition that, if religion is to be taken seriously, due attention must be given to the transcendent aspect of religious experience, practice, belief and doctrine. Whether or not their starting point in experience and hierophany constitutes a valid reading of the generic category of religion is, in the present context, relatively unimportant. Indeed Ricoeur's distinction between `proclamation' and `manifestation' ^ concerned as it is to make room for the fact that, in the Abrahamic traditions at least, God reveals himself not through some abstract quasi-aesthetic feeling or experience but through the proclamation of a discernible and substantial prophetic message ^ suggests that the work of Otto and Eliade requires signi¢cant emendation if it is to do justice to the particularity of speci¢c religious traditions (Ricoeur 1995: 48¡ ). What is important, however, is the recognition that a phenomenon is `religious' by virtue of its orientation or intentionality towards the numinous, sacred or transcendent. Without this, phenomena

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cease to be distinctively religious. Thus, when in 1975 the Birmingham Agreed Syllabus for Religious Instruction courted controversy by including humanism and Marxism as quasi-religious belief systems worthy of investigation, its thinking was based on a categorical mistake (City of Birmingham Education Committee 1975). Though Marxism and humanism have many traits in common with religion ^ a clear belief system, committed adherents, ceremonial activities, etc. ^ their lack of intentionality towards the transcendent realm shows them to be no more than secular alternatives to religion. Two conclusions are to be drawn from this. The ¢rst is that any reading of religion adopting psychological, sociological, anthropological or ethnographical methods and proceeding by bracketing out in advance any transcendent truth claims, is likely to be reductive. The second is that the potentially transformational power of religious education lies in its ability to expose children to the realm of the transcendent. This is not to deny the value of the various human sciences as tools for interpreting religion, merely to point out the dangers of raising them to the status of meta-disciplines at the expense of more fundamental philosophical and theological investigative tools. Neither is it to argue for the indoctrination of children into an acceptance of the truth of the claim that the transcendent realm is an actual reality. It is, however, to suggest that any study of religion that does not have at its heart the exploration of questions of transcendence ^ regardless of any conclusions that may be drawn ^ will, from the outset, be a reductive activity unable to do justice to the heart of religion. If the question of transcendence is bracketed out of the educational equation then the transformative potential of religious education is e¡ectively emasculated.

Education and transformation A major challenge facing a religious education oriented towards the pursuit of transcendent truth lies in the fact that the western world in general no longer expects religion to be transformational. Years of colonisation and domestication within the immanent meta-narratives of modernity have left religion privatised and powerless. The Enlightenment was grounded in the belief that humanity had passed from the dark ages of religious superstition into the enlightened world of reason and, despite the fact that the deconstruction of the edi¢ce of modernity has brought about a renewed interest in spiritual issues, religion itself still faces a signi¢cant challenge in attempting to demonstrate its inherent plausibility. This is something that Eliade sees clearly. He distinguishes the desacralised world of modernity from the sacred world of archaic civilisations, and suggests that the total experience of life of homo religious contrasts markedly from the experience of the person with no religious feeling living in the profane world of modernity. He also insists that the completely profane world, the wholly desacralised cosmos, is a recent discovery in the history of the human spirit. Since the absence of the sacred

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permeates many aspects of the life-worlds of the non-religious citizens of modernity, it has become increasingly di¤cult to recover the existential dimensions of a religious life and religious world-view. Given the commitment of a pedagogy rooted in the post-modern philosophy of di¡erence to open children's hearts and minds to alternative ways of being in the world, it follows that enabling pupils to encounter and critically engage with the transcendent horizons of religion constitutes one of the major tasks facing religious educators today. The need to challenge what he terms the modern `suspicion of the spiritual' is at the heart of David Hay's approach to religious education (Hay 1985). We have already examined his suggestion that religious educators should present religion as the response of human beings to their experience of the sacred, thereby simultaneously challenging the modern veiling of children's natural propensity for transcendent experience and cultivating their openness to spiritual experience and their ability to empathise with religious believers. It is clear that the transformational pedagogy currently being defended here resonates strongly with the central thrust of Hay's argument: religious education has a duty to bring about the transformation of children's lives by freeing them from the narrow horizons of modernity and opening up the possibility of a religious understanding of themselves and of the world they indwell. However, Hay's programme is, as it stands, in need of substantial revision. As we have already seen, his reading of modernity fails to recognise the pivotal role played by romanticism in the development of the legacy of the Enlightenment. Hence he fails to see that, in advocating a pedagogy committed to the recovery, cultivation and stimulation of spiritual experience, he simply frees modern religious education from its dependence on a naturalistic world-view and relocates it within the world-view of romanticism. Just as naturalism eclipses the horizon of religious transcendence by o¡ering a reductive materialistic account of religion, so romanticism threatens to undermine that same horizon with a similarly reductive psychological account of religion. In both instances transcendence remains trapped within the profane world of modernity, its transformative potential domesticated and explained away as a product of either social construction or psychological projection. One of the potential dangers of Hay's turn to experience is that any appeal to free-£oating and self-authenticating spiritual experience will lead directly from romanticism into an anti-realistic world-view. This is clearly not Hay's intention, since his universal theology is unambiguously realistic. However, his lack of critical engagement with the work of post-modern philosophers such as Rorty, Foucault and Derrida does appear to leave the anti-realistic door ¢rmly ajar. Adrian Thatcher's critique of Hay's position charges him with a commitment to individualism and a mind^body dualism that takes insu¤cient account of the communal nature of language (Thatcher 1991). He points out the implications of Wittgenstein's attack on the notion that

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individual experience may be articulated through some form of `private language': `expressing my own mental states or feeling states is impossible without a shared publicly-owned language and considerable induction into its use, with the result that descriptions of sensations and feelings rely on prior social realities, provided by a linguistic community' (23). The suggestion is that Hay's programme, rather than opening children up to an encounter with the transcendent truth claims owned and articulated by a variety of di¡erent religious traditions, merely encourages them to construct their own private spiritual realities on the basis of their subjective experience. Thatcher is clear that an informed and re£ective understanding of transcendence is impossible without a prior engagement with the world-views, communal narratives and doctrinal systems of speci¢c religious communities. Though Hay rigorously rejects the charge that his pedagogy is individualistic and dualistic, and has recently begun to address the communal dimension of spiritual experience, it is clear that he does not envisage religious education as engaging primarily with the narratives, language games and doctrinal formulas of the world religions (Hay and Hammond 1992, Hay with Nye 1998). Thatcher's critique clearly demonstrates that if religious education is to be genuinely transformational it is not enough simply to seek to recover a lost dimension of the child's experiential capacity. On the contrary, a transformational religious education must be driven by an encounter with the stories and narratives through which religious traditions seek to describe and engage with reality. Critical religious education, that is to say, requires the cultivation of religious literacy, not merely spiritual sensibility. It follows that approaches such as the method of `concept-cracking' advocated by Trevor Cooling, which is speci¢cally designed to enable children to connect with religious vocabulary and language, and thereby to learn to use it e¡ectively, o¡er a more secure basis for a transformative religious education (Cooling 1994b).

The politics of difference The transformational religious education defended here constitutes a fundamental challenge to the curriculum politics that have dominated the subject, in a variety of forms, since the Enlightenment. In 1798 Kant published his Con£ict of the Faculties, a text which in many ways set the parameters for the ongoing debate, recently revived by post-modern educators, concerning the relationship between power and knowledge in education (Kant 1992). Kant sets out to arbitrate between academic concerns for the free expression of ideas, and political concerns for social order and the common good of society. He envisages an ongoing con£ict between the `lower' faculty of philosophy concerned with the pursuit of objective knowledge, and the `higher' faculties of theology, law and medicine concerned with the professional development

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of ministers of religion, lawyers and doctors. Where the activities of the faculty of philosophy are carried out on neutral ground uncontaminated by issues of policy and practice, the higher faculties operate in the value-laden realm of public a¡airs. Since the practices of the higher faculties are of direct public interest and concern they must be politically accountable at both local and national levels of government. Kant identi¢es theology as a higher faculty: its dependence on divine revelation rather than human reason means that it is unable to lay claim to pure objective knowledge, and as a result it must be viewed as an applied science whose value lies in its practical utility rather than in its ability to generate knowledge. Kant's basic position is re£ected in Schleiermacher's proposals regarding the academic structure of the newly founded University of Berlin, one of the pioneering modern universities (Kelsey 1992: 79f ). Envisaging the university as combining the tasks of teaching and research, he deliberately raises the status of research in the liberal arts and sciences, and clearly separates such research from specialised teaching intended to prepare students for entry into the professions of theology, law and medicine. The core task of Wissenschaft ^ disciplined critical research ^ in the liberal arts and sciences is `inquiry leading to the mastery of truth about whatever is studied' (83). Though a Protestant faculty of theology was included in the university it was not located in the liberal arts faculty, since its foundational appeal to the authority of divine revelation was deemed to be closed to critical enquiry. Hence Schleiermacher's rationale for inclusion of theology in the modern university, like Kant's before him, rests not on its ability to conduct research driven by the pursuit of knowledge, but rather on the practical task of training clergy for their professional roles and responsibilities. The professional training carried out in the university was directed towards the well being of society, since the university ultimately exists for the well being of the state. Theology, according to Schleiermacher, constitutes a practical rather than a pure science, rooted in and serving a speci¢c historical, cultural and political reality. The position adopted by Kant and secured by Schleiermacher has had a fundamental, albeit indirect, impact on religious education. Rejecting the notion that the study of religion generates knowledge of the actual order-ofthings, the place of religion in the curriculum is justi¢ed on the pragmatic ground that it makes a signi¢cant contribution to the well being of society. This, as we have seen, still constitutes one of the basic rationales through which religious education in the western world is justi¢ed ^ when indeed it is justi¢ed. Though the primary task of religious education in schools and universities is no longer that of contributing to the training of ministers of religion, it is deemed by its defenders to have a signi¢cant role to play in supporting personal spiritual development and contributing to the harmonious well being of society. As Schleiermacher and Kant were only too keenly aware, such a justi¢cation of the study of theology is dependent on

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public perceptions of the usefulness of the practice of religion for society as a whole: as secularisation progressively diminishes such perceptions, so the legitimation of the subject within publicly funded programmes of education becomes increasingly suspect. Hence the dilemma of contemporary religious education: unable to defend itself on the grounds of the intrinsic importance of its subject matter, it ¢nds itself increasingly dependent on public perceptions that religion still has a signi¢cant role within society. The adoption of the reactive strategy of seeking to persuade the public of the importance of religious understanding for the well being of society leaves little room for any transformational role for the subject. Religious education, if it is to be transformative, needs to challenge this entire modern tradition. In particular the liberal rejection of religious knowledge as uncertain, coupled with the decision to relegate such knowledge to the status of privatised and optional belief, needs to be challenged. If we reject the notion that the only viable knowledge is certain knowledge, and that we come to understand the world on the basis of a contingent ^ though nevertheless informed and re£ective ^ rationality, then there is no reason why the issue of religious truth may not be located once again in the public sphere. The question as to what, ultimately, constitutes the bed-rock of reality ^ whether God, some other transcendent reality, the natural world, human experience, collective values or unconstrained creativity ^ is thus transformed into a vital public issue. Further it is an issue around which it is impossible to establish any neutral ground: the theist, agnostic and atheist alike have no option but to make some form of prior faith commitment. Hence the pursuit of religious truth becomes an important, unavoidable and entirely justi¢able activity in its own right. This openness to alternative ways of making sense of reality is one of the chief gifts that the post-modern philosophy of di¡erence has to o¡er religious education, just as the mapping out of informed and intelligent ways of responding to this situation constitutes one of the chief gifts of the philosophy of critical realism. The contribution of religious education to personal and social development need not be grounded in its extrinsic utility as a buttress to one or other modern or post-modern way of ordering selfhood and society. On the contrary, its intrinsic value lies in its duty to enable society to learn to ask fundamental questions about the nature of reality in an informed and intelligent manner, and as a result to open out a range of di¡erent options for our personal and social being in the world. It follows from this that religious education must set its face against the kind of closed liberal world-view exempli¢ed in the work of Brian Barry. His commitment to a narrowly dogmatic liberalism leads him to challenge the position adopted by defenders of a multicultural `politics of di¡erence' (Barry 2001). In particular he challenges the institutionalisation of cultural diversity through the use of public funds to support minority cultures. The politicisation of cultural identity, he argues, elevates the values of tolerance

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and fraternity above the more fundamental egalitarian principle of universal justice. Ultimately he views cultural diversity as nothing more than a relatively unimportant set of quantitative di¡erences; since there is no qualitative distinction between cultures it follows that minority cultures have nothing substantial to teach us. This leaves Barry blind to the voices of adherents of minority cultures and defenders of alternative world-views, whose world-views exist in tension with the mainstream liberal legacy of the Enlightenment. He embraces a monistic commitment to a speci¢c liberal political economy rooted in a particular set of values, beliefs and civic expectations. Cultural practice, he argues, cannot be exempt from the need to satisfy universal standards of meaning and morality, and consequently human £ourishing is not dependent on the survival of any or all minority groups. He claims that, `because human beings are virtually identical as they come from the hand of nature . . . there is nothing straightforwardly absurd about the idea that there is a single best way for human beings to live' (262). It is a simple fact that some cultures are better than others, `more just, more free, more enlightened, and generally better adapted to human £ourishing' (267). Though Barry's rejection of cultural relativism is a position critical religious educators are happy to espouse, they baulk at his ensuing rejection of Charles Taylor's view that, given the fundamental disputes about the ultimate nature of reality present in a diverse multicultural society, we should at least proceed on the presumption that cultures are of equal value (Taylor 1992b). For Barry egalitarian liberalism is simply true, justi¢ed not on the basis that this is how we do things in the west, but on the basis of the universal claim that this is the right thing to do. In other words his ontological and metaphysical bed-rock is that of a normative liberal social construct, which he seeks to impose on alternative accounts of the ultimate order-of-things by relegating them to the private sphere of accidental and insigni¢cant beliefs. Hence the double-edged claim that `it is precisely because liberals recognize the important role that religion plays in many people's lives that they emphasize the importance of neutralizing it as a political force' (Barry 2001: 25). This leads to the further contention that the failure of minority groups to £ourish occurs not because their de¢ning cultural attributes are repressed or go unrecognised, but because they do poorly at achieving generally shared objectives such as good education, desirable and well-paid jobs, safe and salubrious neighbourhoods, and good incomes and housing. The possibility that minority cultures embody substantial ontological, metaphysical and religious truths is ruled out a priori. Barry's educational policy is fundamentally closed to the alterity of the Other. Barry's position needs to be contrasted with that of defenders of a multicultural politics of di¡erence (Galston 1991, 2002; Kymlicka 1995, 2001; Parekh 2000; Young 1990, 2000). Advocates of this position adopt a relational understanding of selfhood: if personal identity £ows from communal

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relationships then culture becomes an essential aspect of human £ourishing. It follows from this that the needs of minority groups cannot be divorced from the interests of mainstream liberal society. More than this, concern for the needs of minority groups needs to be supplemented by a recognition of the potential contribution of minority groups, at a fundamental level, to mainstream society. Hence Kymlicka's theory of minority rights, which sets out to defend the rights not just of individuals but of minority groups, needs to be supplemented with an appreciation of the duty of those groups to contribute substantially to the £ourishing of society as a whole by inviting all citizens to engage with their bed-rock understandings of reality (Kymlicka 1995). We are here in the realm of a soft liberalism designed not to police a liberal world-view, but to enable conversation to take place between di¡erent groups whose fundamental interpretations of reality are signi¢cantly at odds with one another. An example may help clarify this argument. Barry argues that it is logically and psychologically impossible to give equal and simultaneous recognition to the belief of southern Baptists in the United States that homosexuality is contrary to the will of God and of those individuals and communities who view a gay life-style as something to be celebrated (Barry 2001: 270f ). Barry appears to lack imagination here. It is certainly true that we will all have our distinctive views on this matter, but this does not prevent us from recognising that others hold views di¡erent from our own, nor from accepting that the various viewpoints £ow from fundamentally incompatible world-views. If like Barry we take our own viewpoint as standard, consider the views of others as aberrations, and then impose our preferred position onto the curriculum all we will end up with is a pedagogy grounded in the administration of power. Far better, surely, to open the whole question up for debate in the classroom, thereby avoiding an economy of raw power by enabling di¡erent voices a fair hearing. The ensuing debate will not get very far unless pupils are enabled to recognise the fundamental presuppositions which the various parties bring to the debate. It will be necessary here to explore the core ontological and metaphysical commitments of each group by unpacking their fundamental understandings of reality. This does not preclude individuals from owning and living out their own commitments, or from rejecting the commitments of others. But this will be done in a spirit of humility grounded in a mutual recognition of the Otherness of contrasting positions, coupled with a willingness to attempt to understand others as others understand themselves. An education rooted in the philosophy of di¡erence will strive to take alternative viewpoints with the utmost seriousness, and commit itself to the struggle to avoid any imperialistic imposition of one view on another. An honest recognition of di¡erence and disagreement is in¢nitely preferable to a paternalistic and authoritarian regime of cultural oppression. Here transformation is not imposed: in many ways the views of various groups are likely

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to remain ¢rmly in place. What will be di¡erent will be an informed and re£ective understanding of the genuine di¡erences that exist in society, including fundamental religious di¡erences, grounded in openness and respect. It is on this basis that a transformative religious education will be able to make a substantial contribution to society. By opening up questions of transcendence, ultimate truth, and the make-up and structure of the actual order-of-things, such a religious education will enable a multicultural society to approach questions of ultimate truth, together with the allied issues of personal development and social well being, in an informed manner open to the substantial di¡erences embedded within society as a whole. In such a polity the legitimacy of religious education will lie not primarily in its ability to buttress the moral and intellectual norms of contemporary culture, but rather in its ability to challenge such norms with alternative possibilities. Religious education, that is to say, will make a substantial rather than a merely token contribution to the well being of individuals-in-society, and it is precisely here that its potential to be transformative is to be found. In this chapter we have seen how the post-modern philosophy of di¡erence, with its commitment to keep alternative horizons of meaning open, o¡ers a path towards a substantial and signi¢cant rejuvenation of religious education. Religion raises fundamental transcendental questions about the ultimate order-of-things, questions that challenge the modern view that such questions constitute only pseudo-issues that are intellectually and existentially unimportant, and hence best relegated to the sphere of optional and private belief. A domesticated and denuded religious education whose only function is to buttress the status quo of contemporary culture cannot possibly contribute to the transformation of society. The post-modern philosophy of di¡erence insists that the £ourishing of individuals-in-community is dependent on our ability to keep the horizons of di¡erence genuinely open. A religious education grounded in the public pursuit of religious truth, and of course its secular alternatives, promises to be a transformational education, one capable of expanding our insight and understanding and thereby enabling us to address such issues in an informed and wise manner. This commitment to religious openness constitutes the starting point for a critical religious education, the contours of which we will seek to unpack in the ¢nal chapter.

Chapter 17

Critical religious education

Though openness to the possibility of ultimate truth is a necessary component of critical religious education, it is clearly not a su¤cient one. Mere awareness of transcendental horizons of di¡erence is in danger of locking the religious education curriculum into a monolithic and ultimately agnostic theology of re/enchantment, and as a result needs to be supplemented by a practical, a¡ective and re£ective wisdom through which students can begin to learn to respond intelligently to a plurality of religious questions and answers. As the post-modern philosophy of di¡erence guides us towards openness and alterity, so critical realism points us towards religious literacy.

Taking stock Before drawing our discussion to a close it may help if we take stock and bring together the threads of the argument presented in the previous chapters. We began by addressing philosophical questions, and in doing so resisted the temptation of making an either/or choice between modernity and postmodernity. Though recognising a certain level of truth in the claim that the meta-narratives of modernity combine to form a closed and hence authoritarian system, we also noted that post-modern anti-realism embraces similar totalitarian traits. We proceeded by adopting a middle path, suggesting the possibility of a positive synergetic relationship between post-modern alterity and the re£ective wisdom espoused by critical realism. This philosophical investigation provided a framework for our exploration of theology. Noting the tendency of both modernity and post-modernity to domesticate theology within their received frameworks of understanding, and contrasting this with alteristic philosophy's concern to keep alternative horizons of meaning open, we suggested that religious education needs to encourage students to listen to a diversity of religious stories ^ orthodox and heterodox, occidental and extra-occidental, pre-modern, modern and post-modern. Turning to the issue of education we saw how modern education tends to induct students into the restrictive meta-narratives of naturalism, romanticism and liberalism,

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while post/pedagogy repeats the process by imposing an anti-realistic worldview. A genuinely critical education, we suggested, needs to combine a fundamental openness towards a range of horizons of meaning with the cultivation of a re£ective wisdom capable of empowering students to negotiate their way through an increasingly complex cultural context. Finally we argued that religious education must avoid the conventional route of utilising religion to buttress the meta-narratives of naturalism, romanticism, liberalism and anti-realism, and strive instead to ful¢l its transformational potential by opening pupils up to questions of ultimate truth and cultivating appropriate levels of religious literacy. The critical approach to religious education espoused here does not claim legitimacy on any extrinsic grounds: its place in the curriculum should not be dependent on its contribution to social, personal and moral education. On the contrary, its justi¢cation lies in the intrinsic importance of religion itself: in its ability to make available to, and challenge children with, the truth claims the various religions make regarding the actual order-of-things. The integrity of critical religious education, that is to say, is rooted in its pursuit of ultimate truth. Though this search for truth will inevitably impact on social, personal and moral development, it cannot be allowed to drive it if the integrity of the subject is to be upheld. An education concerned with questions of religious truth must accept the fact that religion is a fundamentally ambiguous entity. This ambiguity embraces at least four overlapping issues. Firstly that of the unity of religion: the generic notion of `religion' quickly breaks down into questions about individual religious traditions, and about diversity and coherence within such traditions. Secondly that of the appropriation of religion: the nature of the spiritual lives of individual believers, and of the various ways in which they formulate, a¤rm, develop and change their beliefs and life-stances is an extremely complicated one. Thirdly that of the impact of secularism: religious faith can only be properly understood ^ at least in contemporary western society ^ by attending to the signi¢cance for religious belief of agnosticism and atheism. Fourthly that of the integrity and fallibility of human nature: of the intellectual problems that £ow from our attempts to engage with questions of ultimate truth; of the moral challenges thrown up by both the light and dark sides of religion; and of the aesthetic questions raised by a rich diversity of religious life-styles, both those that enrich human life and those that tend towards infantile regression. This recognition of the ambiguity of religion need not result in a relativistic counsel of despair. On the contrary, such ambiguity should function as an intellectual and spiritual driver of the pedagogic process, spurring the struggle for religious literacy. In proposing a critical religious education there is no intention to set up some universal model, framework or paradigm. There is a constant danger that such an enterprise would simply end up producing yet another

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restrictive pedagogical framework. Religious education will always be contextual, operating within the historical, cultural and intellectual constraints imposed upon it by virtue of its particular geographical and temporal location. As such it will always be a party to the transmission of speci¢c knowledge, beliefs, values and attitudes. The important question here is how, given its inevitably contextual nature, religious education can set about the pedagogic task in a manner that opens up questions of ultimate truth and cultivates appropriate levels of religious literacy. Critical education must acknowledge and respect its given context, but needs to be wary of allowing this context to impose restrictive and narrowly de¢ned truth claims. It is important to achieve a balance between givenness and alterity, between a hermeneutic of faith and a hermeneutic of suspicion. As a result critical religious education is not primarily concerned to ground itself in either of two fairly standard approaches to the advancement of the subject. The ¢rst of these seeks to drive the subject by attempting to identify the nature and contours of religion in order to establish prior agreement about the material content of the curriculum. The second seeks to identify appropriate methodological and hermeneutical procedures that the teacher can employ in the classroom. Both these approaches are, by their very nature, extremely powerful. The way religion is represented in the classroom, together with the teaching and learning strategies employed, will inevitably have a direct and substantial impact on the way in which pupils come to understand religion. Hence it is important, before embarking on this twin process, to ask a set of more fundamental question regarding the core principles and values upon which decisions about curriculum development and pedagogical procedures ought to be made. It is at this initial stage that critical religious education seeks to make an impact, by identifying a set of virtues capable of driving and directing the subject as a whole. In advocating a set of core virtues designed to inform the task of religious education there is no suggestion that they are in anyway universal, valuefree and disengaged from economies of power. On the contrary they have a speci¢c provenance, rooted as they are in a western occidental cultural context operating in the borderlands between modernity and post-modernity. Hence their justi¢cation lies purely in their practical utility as a means of o¡ering a viable path forward for the subject, one capable of limiting the abuse of power, opening up questions of transcendent truth and cultivating religious literacy. Of the four virtues considered here two are drawn from the post-modern philosophy of di¡erence and two from the philosophy of critical realism: these are, respectively, the virtues of honesty and receptivity, and of wisdom and truthfulness. At ¢rst glance it may appear rather bland and obvious to suggest that the enterprise of religious education ought to be honest, receptive, wise and truthful. However, as we shall see, these virtues are all too often absent from the religious education classroom.

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The virtues of critical religious education The ¢rst of our four virtues is that of honesty. One of the key insights of postmodernity is that there is no avoiding an entanglement with language: the modern belief that neutrality and objectivity turn language into a transparent medium through which we make direct contact with reality is no longer tenable. This does not mean that language necessarily £oats free of reality, merely that the relationship between language and the world is complex, ambiguous and necessarily controversial. Since there is no impartial vantage point available to us, religious education will always be a grounded and contextual education. As such it will have no option but to engage with the religious tensions and ambiguities that are an inevitable result of the parochial nature of education. Two strategies are ruled out here as being fundamentally dishonest: the ¢rst is to embrace an `archic' authoritarianism by imposing a single universal reading of religion in the classroom, the second is to adopt an `an/archic' relativism by asserting that all readings of religion are equally valid. Despite their di¡erences both strategies have a common outcome: by dissolving di¡erence into sameness they attempt to disguise the reality of religious ambiguity and as a result end up abdicating their pedagogical responsibilities. The search for the middle ground between these extremes will be driven by the virtue of honesty. All parties involved in the pedagogic process need to be candid in identifying, articulating and publicly owning their prior commitments, beliefs and values. Critical religious education demands openness about the complexities of the learning environment; the aims, content and pedagogic processes embraced by the curriculum; the prior commitments of pupils, teachers, school and home; the impact of local, national and international politics; and the ambiguities and truth claims of religion. Without such honesty the pedagogic process will inevitably be driven by unacknowledged economies of power. With such honesty the power-structures will remain ¢rmly in place, but now all parties involved will have at least some awareness of, and hence at least some level of control over, the way in which they operate. Such honesty will never completely emancipate students, but it will greatly increase the possibility of engineering their freedom from restrictive power-structures and cultivating their freedom for a proper relationship with the order-of-things. The second virtue is that of receptivity to horizons of di¡erence, understood in terms both of the need to develop ways of penetrating deeper into one's own received world-view, and of the need to attend to alternative accounts of the order-of-things. Such receptivity is grounded in the postmodern desire for freedom: not the anti-realistic freedom to construct an imaginary hyper-reality, but rather the alteristic freedom to have one's cherished fore-structures of understanding challenged by alternative voices of meaning as a means of guiding the pilgrimage towards an appropriate

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relationship with the ultimate order-of-things. The virtue of receptivity rejects a hermeneutic that simply encloses meaning within the straitjacket of the unre£ective horizon of the student and thereby does nothing more than con¢rm his or her given assumptions and prejudices. Instead it embraces a transformative hermeneutic in which alternative horizons of meaning are allowed to question the student's presuppositions and o¡er alternative ways of engaging with the world. The virtue of receptivity requires students to become sensitive not merely to their own thoughts, feelings, narratives and meanings, but also to those of the other individuals, groups and narratives they encounter. Above all this openness to newness and di¡erence must relate directly to the horizon of religious meaning and truth; it cannot simply be reduced to a general feeling of empathy towards cultural and social di¡erence. If such receptivity is genuine then it will enable students to feel the full impact of alternative world-views, and demand an informed and re£ective response from them. The truth claims of religion are vital, ambiguous and unavoidable: vital because it matters how we live out our lives, ambiguous because we are faced with a host of con£icting and competing meta-narratives, unavoidable because we all live our lives within a framework of meaning, whether modern or post modern, religious or secular. Without receptivity the challenge of di¡erence will fall on deaf ears. Our third virtue is that of wisdom, understood here along the lines of the rich notion of rationality developed by critical realists. Receptivity to voices of di¡erence will lead inevitably and directly to the clash of incompatible horizons of meaning. Though critical religious education views the ensuing tensions as possessing a deep pedagogical value, some religious educators have tended to see them as problems to be overcome. Two main strategies have been employed to dissipate the shock of such clashes: the ¢rst is to give absolute priority to one speci¢c horizon of meaning and impose it as the one true account of religion; the second is to adopt the ideological position that all horizons of meaning are equally valid. Both strategies seriously undermine the virtue of wisdom: either students are forced into an uncritical acceptance of a single monolithic horizon of meaning, or else they ¢nd themselves selecting from a range of options on the basis of personal preference, desire or inclination. The wise response to the clash of horizons is to search for deeper understanding by critically engaging with the ambiguities that result from the juxtaposition of incompatible horizons of meaning. Wisdom, that is to say, needs to be distinguished on the one hand from the kind of uncritical emotivism espoused by romantic forms of religious education and reinforced by forms of religious post/pedagogy, and on the other from narrow rationalistic and empiricist modes of thought noted for their aridity, neutrality and lack of sensitivity. Receptivity to di¡erence brings us face to face with a complex and ambiguous world, one that we can only hope to begin to understand by learning to become wiser persons.

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The virtue of wisdom espoused here contains at least four dimensions. In the ¢rst place it seeks to cultivate religious literacy, conceived not in a narrowly linguistic sense, but in the broader sense of an ability to take responsibility for one's relationship with religious issues in an informed, re£ective, sensitive, imaginative and responsible manner. Secondly such wisdom will involve an immersion in the various academic disciplines through which scholars have learnt to interrogate religion: both the `secular' disciplines such as anthropology, psychology and ethnography cultivated by programmes of religious studies, and the more speci¢cally meta-disciplines of theology and philosophy. Thirdly such wisdom will embrace an orientation towards meta-questions of ultimate truth and meaning, as these are expressed in a variety of realistic and anti-realistic meta-narratives. And ¢nally such wisdom will be holistic, embracing the whole child in the depths of his or her spiritual existence. The religiously educated person will be capable of thinking, feeling, communicating and acting intelligently in response to the claims of religious traditions, and their secular counterparts, as these seek to respond to the ultimate mystery of the world. The mark of the religiously educated person is their ability to engage in an intelligent conversation about religion and to live their lives in accordance with their conversations. Our fourth and ¢nal virtue is that of truthfulness. In a sense this virtue is already embodied in the previous three virtues: honesty about where we are coming from, openness towards di¡erence, and the cultivation of wisdom all embrace and underpin the search for truth. The virtue of truthfulness will be suspicious of premature claims to be able to access completely the totality of truth as encountered, for example, in the dogmas of modern positivism, postmodern anti-realism and various types of religious fundamentalism. All such claims to possess ultimate truth must be tempered by a recognition that we cannot play god, and that our understanding of ourselves and our world, however accurate and well informed, will nevertheless always be at least one step behind the actual truth of things. The truths of pre-modern and extra-occidental religious perspectives, together with the modern truths of naturalism, romanticism and liberalism, and the post-modern truths of hyper-realism and alterity, must all be given a voice. The struggle for truth will always be a contingent and local a¡air, in which we strive to make the best sense we can of a complex and ambiguous situation from a restricted horizon and with limited resources. However, despite necessarily proceeding from the local, the search for ultimate truth will be marked by a drive towards the universal. Truthfulness here is understood as embodied truth: though it certainly involves propositional knowledge, such knowledge must be seen as an aspect of the broader and more holistic concern to relate appropriately to the ultimate order-of-things and thereby live a truthful life. Critical religious education is ultimately concerned to enable students to engage for themselves in the struggle to establish an authentic relationship with the ultimate

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order-of-things. To reject the pursuit of truth is to allow oneself to become subservient to one or other economy of power; the premature foreclosure of the search for better and more truthful ways of being in the world will lead only to religious illiteracy. We arrive, then, at the heart of the constructive argument presented in this book: critical religious education, drawing on the insights of post-modern alterity and critical realism, calls religious educators to be honest about the contextual horizons within which learning takes place, receptive to alternative horizons of meaning, wise in its negotiation of horizons of meaning and truthful in its drive to engage with the ultimate order-of-things.

Testing the virtues It is illuminating to look at contemporary religious education in the light of these four virtues. Is it honest about its context and presuppositions, and receptive to alternative horizons of meaning? Does it genuinely strive to establish religious literacy through the pursuit of truth? First, then, honesty about the context, presuppositions and prior commitments of all parties involved in the learning process. We begin by noting the tendency to ground the religious education curriculum in a speci¢c metanarrative ^ naturalistic, romantic, liberal or anti-realistic ^ that is then treated as normative, and suggest that it is precisely because such foundational narratives are considered normative that they are rarely acknowledged and articulated in any formal way. As a result children are inducted into readings of religion that derive from speci¢c world-views that, on the surface level at least, are invisible. We can also note a singular lack of concern for the received horizons of the students: either they are invited to bracket out their prejudices and presuppositions, or else they are expected to rely on their inner sensibilities and feelings without recourse to the narratives, histories and traditions that shape and form such emotions. Though rarely intentionally dishonest, we have encountered in contemporary religious education surprisingly little concern to systematically articulate the underlying beliefs and values that both shape and impinge on the learning environment. Turning to the virtue of receptivity, we can identify two essentially reductionist ways of dealing with alternative horizons of meaning. The ¢rst approaches openness to di¡erence on a purely cultural level, requiring students to empathise with the life-styles of adherents of a range of religious traditions, but not to engage directly with the question of the truth of their accounts of the ultimate order-of-things. The second approaches openness to di¡erence on a purely psychological level, encouraging children to turn inwards and develop a deeper sense of self-awareness, but showing little concern for their relationship with the external world. Both limit receptivity to levels of psychological and socio-cultural immanence, and in doing so fail to open the hearts and minds of students to transcendent possibilities.

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The relationship of contemporary religious education to the cultivation of wisdom has tended to develop in two directions. The ¢rst is that of a dry rationalistic process in which pupils are encouraged to develop objective descriptions of religious phenomena, and the second is that of an emotivism in which children are encouraged to identify and articulate their inner spiritual feelings. The combination of these two approaches constitutes an academic failure: neither allows intellectual questions to drive the subject, and consequently the task of religious education is viewed as a qualitatively di¡erent process than that adopted by other subject disciplines. As a result paternalistic regimes of moral, social and spiritual formation tend to take precedence over any cognitive engagement with religious issues. The result is a lack of public religious literacy grounded in the virtue of wisdom. The place of truthfulness in contemporary religious education has been deeply in£uenced by modern attempts to privatise and domesticate the truth claims of particular religious traditions. Many religious educators have come to accept that questions of ultimate truth are not for public consumption, but rather form an optional aspect of the private lives of individuals. Indeed in the public domain the ambiguity of religion is frequently viewed as a problem to be overcome; there is a tendency to assume that the tensions between con£icting accounts of ultimate reality threaten the well being of society, and as such need to be smoothed over. The standard liberal response ^ a¤rming freedom of belief and insisting on the need to tolerate the beliefs of others ^ serves merely to circumnavigate the very real con£icts permeating contemporary society. We have seen that contemporary religious education regularly allows the moral agenda of negating religious tensions to eclipse the academic agenda of engaging with religious ambiguity as part of the ongoing pursuit of ultimate truth. The stark reality, however, is that the strategy of inviting children to bury their heads in the sand will not make such con£icts go away. Religious tensions will only be successfully negotiated if there is genuinely open debate, and such debate must take seriously the world-views of the various parties involved. At present at least the systematic grappling with religious truth in the sphere of public education is conspicuous in its absence. The conclusion to be drawn is that the virtues of honesty, receptivity, wisdom and truthfulness are, at best, only partially and hesitantly present in much contemporary religious education. Hence, despite that fact that at ¢rst glance our advocacy of these virtues as key drivers of the subject might appear to be a little bland, my contention is that they have a signi¢cant role to play in the future development of the subject. A transformative religious education will demand that the context of learning is identi¢ed and articulated by all involved in the learning process; it will insist on receptivity towards a range of alternative accounts of ultimate reality; it will selfconsciously strive to develop appropriate levels of wisdom and literacy; and it will view the pursuit of ultimate truth as its core task. Without the virtues of

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honesty, receptivity, wisdom and truthfulness religious education will be anything but critical.

The virtues in context There is one ¢nal question still to be addressed: that of the scope and application of the virtues of critical religious education. We have already seen that the critical approach is envisaged not as yet another all-encompassing paradigmatic model of religious education, but rather as providing a more general critical orientation capable of being applied to a variety of di¡erent contexts, models and approaches. This suggests that the virtues ought to be able to act as transferable values able to function across di¡erent educational contexts. We will test this theory by seeking to apply the virtues to two distinctive contexts: religious education in liberal schools and religious education in confessional schools. By `liberal schools' we mean those operating within a democratic polity and attempting to respond equitably to a plurality of religious and secular traditions. Such pluralism will be encountered both within the curriculum and amongst sta¡, parents and pupils. A liberal school will be broadly committed to the legacy of the Enlightenment: stressing the importance of the liberal values of freedom and tolerance, respectful of the place of reason and experience in the learning process, and committed to the values of individual autonomy and personal integrity. The agenda of critical religious education will guide such schools away from a closed dogmatic liberalism in the direction of an open liberalism functioning as an interim ethic through which the plurality of interpretations of reality can better be understood and negotiated. What then of our four virtues in this context? In the ¢rst place such schools should have no problem requiring from all parties a level of honesty regarding their prior faith commitments, both religious and secular. Further, such honesty could easily be extended to embrace an acknowledgement of the liberals values upon which the community is founded, and according to which its life is organised. In particular such schools will strive, as far as is possible, to be open and tolerant towards the views of those members of its community who do not share its liberal values. Secondly the schools' appreciation that their liberal values do not constitute ends in themselves, but merely a means through which dialogue within and across cultural pluralism may be enhanced, will lead them to strive to be open and receptive towards alternative horizons of meaning, both religious and secular. Thirdly their commitment to the Enlightenment values of reason will lead them to seek to cultivate appropriate levels of religious literacy through the process of teaching and learning. Fourthly, their entire life as learning communities will be driven by a pursuit of truth, wherever that might take it. There appears, then, to be no prima-facie reason why schools operating within the liberal

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heritage of the Enlightenment should not be able to embrace the virtues of honesty, receptivity, wisdom and truthfulness, and no reason why, as a result, they should not be committed wholeheartedly to the pursuit of truth and the cultivation of religious literacy. How might our four virtues impact on a confessional educational context, in which the pedagogical process is under the control of a speci¢c faith community? Is there any reason why a confessional religious education might ¢ght shy of our four virtues? It is a reasonable assumption to make that a religious school will seek to ground its entire life in its speci¢c world-view and adopt unreservedly the meta-narrative of its host religious community. This may well involve a close reciprocal relationship with liberal values, as seen for example in most Anglican church schools in the United Kingdom. However, other faith schools may wish to distinguish themselves sharply from the liberal tradition: for example, Muslim schools, Orthodox Jewish schools, and more traditionally minded Christian schools operating out of, say, the evangelical or pentecostal traditions. What impact might our four virtues have on the religious education o¡ered by such schools? First the virtue of honesty: does a ¢rm commitment to the veracity of a speci¢c religious tradition rule out honesty about a school's cultural context? There would appear to be enormous value in such schools openly de¢ning themselves both in terms of their prior commitments as well as in relationship to the broader cultural context. Encouraging Muslim children both to recognise the integrity of Islam and identify the distinctiveness of Islam vis-a©-vis alternative world-views would appear to o¡er a positive way of establishing Islamic identity without any real risk of its being undermined. Secondly, what of the virtue of receptivity? This is, of course, a more di¤cult question that requires two responses. On the one hand it is important to recognise that all but the most positivistic and fundamentalist religious traditions recognise a distance between the religious lifeworld of the religious community and the divine reality: religion is a process of striving for a closer, more obedient understanding of God. In this context receptivity would appear to have a role to play ^ not necessarily as an uncritical openness to all possible alternatives, but certainly as openness to a deeper knowledge of God. On the other hand receptivity towards alternative horizons of meaning is far less likely to materialise: it is di¤cult to imagine confessional schools striving to open the minds of students to world-views other than that to which they are committed in anything other than a relatively super¢cial manner. There is no avoiding the fact that the liberal commitment to freedom of thought does not necessarily transfer easily into non-liberal environments. Thirdly, the virtue of wisdom. Once wisdom is seen as a far richer entity than the dry rationalism engendered by some aspects of the Enlightenment tradition, and once restrictive modernist criteria such as a narrow principle of veri¢cation or the primacy of a sceptical hermeneutic of suspicion are removed, then it becomes di¤cult to argue that any of the

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major world religions does not own a primary commitment to the cultivation of wisdom; not an alien wisdom imported from outside, but rather a wisdom the £ows from their distinctive engagement with transcendent reality. Fourthly, and ¢nally, it is di¤cult to imagine any faith community school not fundamentally committed to the virtue of truthfulness. Though the virtues of critical religious education have the potential to impact on faith community schools in a positive manner, such an impact is likely to be far less signi¢cant than any in£uence they might have on liberal schools. It is vital in this context to recognise that the notion of critical education defended here is a product of the legacy of the Enlightenment, and as such has its provenance in the occidental western world. Given the fact that the vast majority of religious traditions do not share this background, the imposition of critical values onto faith community schools faces the very real danger of colonisation and domestication. On one level the virtues may be o¡ered, but certainly not imposed. However on another level the virtues may legitimately impact on the task of faith community schools: if we are to be honest about the pluralistic context of late capitalism, receptive towards religious di¡erence, wise about the various ways in which religion might possibly be understood and interpreted, and genuinely concerned about the ambiguous question of ultimate truth, then we must acknowledge at the structural level the vital importance of allowing individual religious communities to take responsibility for the education of their children on their own terms. Let me repeat: the virtues are not intended to be foundational, merely a heuristic device through which schools from a variety of di¡erent traditions, backgrounds and contexts can re£ect on their pedagogical strategies. One of the chief outcomes of the advent of post-modernity must surely be the development of a structural pluralism through which members of distinctive cultural traditions are empowered to oversee the education of their children in accordance with their foundational meta-narratives. This is as true for communities committed to the legacy of the Enlightenment as it is for those committed to one or other speci¢c religious tradition. Given the numerical superiority of the former group in the west, they will inevitably carry an added burden of responsibility for educating the children of faith community families for whom a faith community school is not available. The virtues of honesty, receptivity, wisdom and truthfulness may well ground the task of religious education in liberal schools that are genuinely open to alterity and di¡erence, though they are unlikely ever to ground the life and work of faith community schools committed to their distinctive foundational narratives and world-views. Nevertheless it is my contention that they can usefully be related to all schools at a structural level, and made available to any school concerned to re£ect on its provision for religious education.

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The impact of post-modernity on the legacy of modernity has much to teach us. We can note the danger of a narrowly conceived post/pedagogy perpetuating modern education's tendency to domesticate and police religion. We can learn from alteristic forms of post-modernity the value of receptivity and honesty without the need to buy wholesale into a post-modern metanarrative. Similarly we can learn from critical realism the virtues of wisdom and the pursuit of truth without committing ourselves to a critically realistic foundational meta-narrative. Our exploration of the interface between religion, education and post-modernity has produced a high view of education as a process of honest, open, wise and truthful struggling with the ultimate mystery of reality and striving after the ultimate truth of the order-of-things. The universal challenges facing humanity urgently require the establishment of a public religious literacy that is open, honest, truthful and wise. Despite the dangers of a narrowly conceived post-modern meta-narrative, a postmodernity resistant to the premature closure of our ongoing wrestling with the ultimate order-of-things, and open to the horizon of alterity, di¡erence and the Other, has much to teach the religious educator.

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Index

a/theism 85^6 a/theology 8, 96, 97, 106, 108, 109, 123; and absolute freedom from constraint 89; analysis, critique, evaluation of 92^5; concept 92^3; failure of 95; as intellectual insular 93; as internally incoherent 95; link with New Age spirituality 89^92; as morally vacuous 94; move towards spiritual desire 84^6; and post-liberalism 113; roots of 82^4; as self-contradictory 95; theological naivety of 93^4; transgressive 86^9 Adorno, T.W. 38 agnosticism 80^1 Ahearne, J. 81, 99 alterity 49^50, 51, 52, 55, 63^4, 97, 175, 231; historical 98, 99, 100; and negative theology 104^5, 106; Same/ Other distinction 49^50; Totality/ In¢nity distinction 49 Altizer, T.J.J. 93; and Hamilton, W. 83 an/archic principle 13, 25, 41, 53, 62, 223 anarchy 38 animal kingdom 3^4 anti-realism 63, 64, 85, 104^5, 108, 165, 208^9; criticisms of 48; and education 148, 149, 150^3; and language/reality 47; and mass-communication 47^8; neo-colonial response to di¡erence 159; and religious education 198, 199; and religious understanding 201^4; and satisfaction of desire 47^8; sceptical 52^3; and signs/symbols 47, see also realism anxiety 40^1 Aquinas, St Thomas 72, 103, 104

arche principle 72^3 Archer, M. et al 52 archic principle 13, 25, 41, 64, 223 Aristotle 72 Aronowitz, S. and Giroux, H. 47, 161^5 Association of University Lecturers in Religion and Education (ALURE) 205 atheism 101^2 Augustine, St 10^11, 71, 101 Avis, P. 76 Ayer, A.J. 17 Balthasar, H.U. von 103 Bantock, G.H. 138 Barth, K. 77, 116 Barthes, R. 30, 101 Bataille, G. 40^1, 97, 145 Baudrillard, J. 46^8, 51, 53, 55, 63^4, 85, 92, 147 Baumann, Z. 49, 148 Beckford, J. 37 Being 25^6 Benhabib, S. 42 Berlin, I. 28, 40 Bernstein, R.J. 11, 13, 52 Berry, P. 69 Bhaskar, R. 52, 57 Bible text 113^15 Blake, N. 129, 159^60 Blond, P. 12 Bloom, H. 92 border pedagogy, background 161^2; curriculum of 163; emphasis on social position/cultural construction 164; engagement with power structures 163; individual/community link 162^3; and personal/political identity

Index 164; pluralist outlook 163; politics of solidarity within di¡erence 164, see also critical education; education; post/pedagogy Borges, J.L. 3^4 Bowen, J. 137^8 Boyne, R. 32 Braaten, C. 90; and Jenson, R.W. 92 Brown, P. and Scase, R. 149 Bruce, S. 94 Buckley, M.J. 101^2 Buren, P.M. 83 Byrne, J.M. 73^4, 75 Calvin, J. 71, 74 Cambridge Platonists 73 Camus, A. 40 Cassirer, E. 20, 97 Certeau, M. de 81, 98^100 Chambliss, J.J. 135 Cherryholmes, C. 142^3 Chinese encyclopaedia 3^4, 7 Christ, as divine logos 88; as symbol of rejection of authority 89; as Word of God 86^7 Christian Faith, The (Schleiermacher) 76 Christianity 25^6, 27, 78, 201; doxology of 118; fundamental problem facing 117; liberal interpretation 80^1; and non-violence 116; and original sin 69; response to challenge of modernity 118; rooted in community 115^16; shift from a¤rmation/pietistic experience to narrated promise 114^ 15; trinitarian 113, 120^2; understanding of grace 69^70 civilisation 137^8 Clark, M.T. 104 Collier, A. 55, 57, 59 Con£ict of the Faculties (Kant) 214^15 Cooling, T. 185, 214 counter-phenomenalism 55 Cowdell, S. 84, 94 Cox, H. 83, 182 critical education 209; a¤rmation, exploration, re£ective wisdom 176^7; context of 174^6; dual focus 171; emancipative/transformative hermeneutics 177^8; engagement with holistic meta-narratives 168; identi¢cation with points of contact 177; knowledge/power relationship

245

169^72; language/meaning 177; and making informed judgements 167^8; meta-narratives as explicit part of 168^9; multifaceted hermeneutical approach 176^7; paternalistic aspects 176; process of 176^8; receptivity 177; and sceptical relativism 170; social/ personal 172^4; spiritual dimension 177^8; and structural pluralism 175; and study of individual subject disciplines 168, see also border pedagogy; education; post/pedagogy critical realism 8, 63, 64^5, 100, 167; background 52^3; and contingent rationality 57^60; and encountering the real world 53^5; and evaluating post-modern philosophy 62^5; knowledge/wisdom shift 60^2; and strati¢cation of knowledge 55^7 critical religious education, ambiguities 221; context 221^2; dual strategy 222; justi¢cation for 221; openness/honesty in 223, 226, 229; receptivity to horizons of di¡erence 223^4, 226, 229; testing the virtues 226^8; truthfulness 225^6, 227, 230; virtues 222, 223^6; virtues in context 228^31; wisdom 224^5, 227, 229^30 cruci¢xion 87, 88, 117^18 Culler, J. 49 culture 24; breakdown in hierarchies/ boundaries of 5^7; diversity in 216^17; and establishment of nontotalitarian counter-culture 44^6, 51; race 91 Cupitt, D. 84^6, 93, 95, 109, 123 dance culture 91^2 Darling, J. 138, 139 Davie, G. 198 Davies, B. 70 Day, D. 182 D'Costa, G. 80^1, 192 De Veritate (Herbert of Cherbury) 73 death of the author 30^1, 35, 41 death-of-God 82^4, 87, 88, 89 deconstruction, binary opposites 33; concept 33; cumulative e¡ect of techniques 35; di¡e¨ rence 34; grafting 34; intertextuality 33^4; of knowledge 199^201; of liberalism 41^4; of metanarratives 50^1; modern education

246

Index

141^6; of naturalism 37^9; and negative theology 104^5, 106, 107; post/pedagogy 154^8; and renegotiation of meta-narratives 44^6; romanticism 39^41; sous-rature (under-erasure) 34^5; trace 35 deism 73^4, 137 demons 11, 14, 15 Denys the Areopagite 103^4 Derrick, C. 52, 61 Derrida, J. 23, 34^5, 43, 63, 84, 93, 95, 96, 97, 105^8, 123, 145, 159, 160, 201 Descartes, R. 10^11, 13^14, 41, 54, 58, 71, 72, 209 desire 84^6, 97 di¡e¨ rence 107 di¡erence 49^50, 51, 55, 175; politics of 214^19 Dionystic vision 41 doxology 118, 121 drugs 91^2 education, and bringing order to society 143^4; child-centred 138^9; classical/ pursuit of knowledge 129^33; constructing post-modern 146^7; and contingent reality 133; contours of post/pedagogy 147^50; curriculum construction/selection 144, 151; deconstructing modern 141^6; e¤cacy of 127^8; and freedom 151, 158^9; liberal 134^6, 145^6; and lifestyle choices 151^3; local/ephemeral vs universal/absolute values 151; manifesto for anti-realistic 150^3; materialism, selfhood, social contract relationship 142; and moral formation 138; and personal development 136^40; persuasion not demonstration 152; positivistic/ techno-rationalistic approaches 150^1; possible malevolent payo¡ 152^3; and power 128^9, 143^4, 146; progressive/child-centred 130, 136^40, 144^5; project of modern 127^9; reason/rhetoric replacement 158; secular/religious approaches 127; subject disciplines 143; traditionalist/ common good 133^6; and voice of the stranger 158^61, see also border pedagogy; critical education; post/ pedagogy

Education Reform Act (1988) 206 Edwards, J. 75 Einstein, A. 58 Eliade, M. 210^11 Eliot, T.S. 60 English and Welsh Education Reform Act (1988) 135 Enlightenment 3, 10, 12, 20, 38, 42, 52, 72, 74, 75, 81, 120, 128^9, 134^9, 175, 230 Erricker, C. and Erricker, J. 189, 199^207 Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Locke) 73 ethics 75^6 existentialism 40, 83 Farewell to Reason (Feyerabend) 38 Feuerbach, L. 77, 101 Feyerabend, P. 38, 39 Fichte, 18 Filmer, P. 148 Flood, G. 43 Ford, D. 49, 103 Foucault, M. 4, 23, 31^2, 98, 112, 127, 145 Francke, A. 75 Frankfurt School 38 freedom 41, 42, 63, 80, 134, 139, 201; absolute 11^12, 70; authentic 50, 51, 61; constraints/responsibilities 134; establishment of 33; of God 70; individual/personal 15, 20, 44, 71, 136; preservation of 45; and pursuit of desire 48; and religious education 191^4; and social reform 128; strategies for 145; unconstrained 15, 31 Frei, H. 113^14 Freud, S. 39 Gadamer, H.G. 52, 59, 61, 99 Gay, P. 127^9 Gellner, E. 52 Genet, J. 34 Gerson, L.P. 73 Gethin, R. 110 Gillespie, M.A. 12, 13, 71 God 53; absolute freedom of 11^12, 70; beyond being 100^2, 103, 104, 106; centrality of 78^9; and creation myths 26^7; domestication of 69^72, 78,

Index 101; double predestination 12; doxological response 102; and eclipse of language 111^12; experience of 77^8; God of the philosophers/God of Abraham distinction 11^12, 22, 27, 72^4, 113; gratitude to 137; impact of modernity 69^81; knowledge of 75; medieval vision of 11; and moral order 75; as mystery beyond understanding 137; new representation of 83; omnipotence of 15, 27, 55, 70^1; as originating principle of rational order 26; personal/abstract distinction 74; and search for identity 87; signi¢cance of death of 83^4; substitute for/absence of 82^3; theological quest for 25^6; transcendent view of 100; trinitarian view 11, 71, 119^22; as writing 86^7 Goldman, R. 187 good life 39, 128, 130 Gray, 11 Grimmit, M. 183 Grimsley, R. 137 Gunton, C.E. 13, 14, 20, 27, 89, 119, 120^2, 123 Habermas, J. 52, 60 Hamilton, W. 83 Handelmann, S. 34 Hardy, D.W. 185 Hart, T. 107 Hauerwas, S. 77, 115^16 Hay, D. 188, 213^14; and Hammond, J. 214; and Nye, R. 214 Haydon, G. 192^3 Heelas, P. 90 Hegel, G.W.F. 34, 98 Heidegger, M. 25^6 Heimbrock, H.-G. et al 196, 198 Held, D. 52 Hemming, L.P. 116, 119 Herbert of Cherbury, Lord 73 Hick, J. 78^81 Hindness, E. 132 Hinnells, J.R. 184 Hirst, P. 129^30, 131^3 history 31, 203, 204; contingent/ ephemeral nature of 98; distorted by discoures of power 99; as errant 87^8; identi¢cation with 98; and myth of

247

eternal recurrence 97, 98; as open to alterity 99; and recovering of alternative narratives 99; revelatory potential 99^100; as source for understanding meaning/purpose of life 98; transformative 97^100 Hodgson, P.C. 60 Holley, R. 187 Holocaust 110, 111^12, 204 Horkheimer, M. 38 Houlden, J.L. 81 Hull, J. 192 Hulliung, M. 137 Hulmes, E. 186 human nature, and divine spark 27; learning as essential to 27; scepticism concerning 28; theological/ philosophical di¡erences 27^8 humanism 32 Hume, D. 17 hyper-realism 47^8, 50, 51, 53, 55, 63, 92^3, 157, 166 idealism 18^19, 53, 85; an/archic 53; and the universe 53^4 identity, and anxiety 40; collective 40; communal/cultural 217^18, 219; essential 145; formation 15; Jewish 112^13; and reduction of self to trace 87; relational 173; search for 87 idolatry 101^2, 106 Illich, P. 137 incarnation 85 Ingra¤a, B.D. 69, 108 Islam 25^6, 27, 43, 78, 172, 192, 202 Jackson, R. 201^2 Jaeger, W. 60, 130 James, C. 41 Jasper, D. 111^12 Jones, C. et al 75 Judaeo-Christian tradition 25^6, 69, 103, 130^1 Judaism 25^6, 27, 78, 201; post-modern interface 110, 111^13 Kafka, F. 40 Kant, I. 18, 71, 75, 150^3, 154, 214^16 Kee, A. 83 Kerr, F. 119 Kierkegaard, S. 57, 98, 191

248

Index

knowledge 215; access to 78; archaeology of 31, 112; authentic 54^5, 58; and belief 20, 170; classical 142; deconstruction of 199^201; evolutionary model 59; and faith 59; fallibility/contingency of 166, 167, 168; as given/grounded 174^5; ironic attitude toward 151^2; and language 31; and mind/reality link 131^2; move toward wisdom 60^2; and the natural world 16^18; political context 199; and power relations 31^2, 35^6, 143^4, 146, 169^72; progress of 31; pursuit of 129^33, 166^9; rational/ mystical 103; sceptical approach to 14^15; search for 13^14; secure 20, 21, 25, 81; and self-awareness 40; and the senses 16^17; and social harmony 134; strati¢cation of 55^7; subjective/ objective 17^18, 19, 36, 77, 78, 121, 129^30, 139; textbook 142^3 Koyre, A. 18 Kristeva, J. 40, 145 Kumar, K. 148^9 Kung, H. 74, 82, 111 Lane, R.J. 46 language 16, 19, 200; agnostics of 25; as babble of con£icting voices 26; and construction of meta-narrative 30; and control of experience 30; deconstruction of 32^6; divinity of 87; and experience 40; and making statements 48; as metaphor 121^2; post-Holocaust 110, 111^12; postZionist 112^13; and reality 47; and representation of order-of-things 28; scienti¢c model of 29^30; signi¢er/ signi¢ed 29^30; spoken/written primacy 29^31; structure of 30; of value 132 Latourette, K.S. 128 Law, W. 74^5 learning 27, 61 learning-from-religion strategy 186^7; criticisms of 189^90; and ideology of romanticism 187^9; and naturalism 188; and religious experience 187^8, 189, 190 Levi, P. 111 Levinas, E. 48^51, 63, 96, 97, 123, 157, 159, 160

liberalism 20^1, 63; closed form 193^4; as colonial/imperial 192; and cultural di¡erence 42; deconstructing 41^4; and education 133^6, 145^6; as heuristic narrative 21; as narrowly dogmatic world-view 21^2; as open interim ethic 193; and orientalism 42^3; origins 21; relationship with post-modernity 43^4; and religious education 191^4; soft version of 192^3; truth of 217; and universal theology 78^81 Lindbeck, G.A. 77, 114, 122 Linnaeus, C. 3 Locke, J. 17, 21, 73, 78, 128, 134^6, 138, 191 logical positivism 14, 17, 155^6 logo-centrism 28, 40, 86, 113; binary opposites 33; de¢nition 26; and making sense of reality 28 Loukes, H. 187 Louth, A. 103 Lyotard, J.-F. 23^5, 37, 46, 128 McGrath, A.E. 59, 63, 168 MacIntyre, A. 22, 52, 115, 201 Madness and Civilisation (Foucault) 31^2 Mann, T. 40 Marion, J.-L. 35, 50, 100^1, 102, 104, 106, 108 Maxwell, N. 62 Meditations on First Philosophy (Descartes) 10^11, 13^15 Memorial (Pascale) 74 mental illness 31^2 meta-narratives 10, 62, 123, 166; construction of 30; as explicit part of curriculum 168^9; foundational 15; impact on education 139; liberalism 20^2; mythic nature of 31; naturalism 16^18; and pedagogy 141; plurality of 174; rejection of 24^5, 35; romanticism 18^20; ultimate 100; viability of 53 metaphysics of presence 26, 28, 199^200 micro-narratives 24^5 Milbank, J. 101, 116, 117^18 mind/body dualism 16^18, 54 mineral kingdom 3 modernism, achievements of 62^3; archic totalitarianism of 13, 25; and concept of God 69^81; construction of

Index humanity 23; and control/ marginalisation of madness 32; deconstructing education 141^6; dismissed as intellectually unobtainable 12^13; dualist thinking 16^18; foundational meta-narratives 10; humankind as focal point 13, 27; and language 30; legacy of 10; natural world/sovereignty of human reason 123; negation of the past 97; and ordering of things 3; post-modern critique 25^6, 45, 120; and power/ authority 10, 32; search for certain knowledge 13^14, 24; selective reading of 41^2; and systematic doubt 14^15; terror/genocide as outcome of 13, 62, see also liberalism; naturalism; romanticism mono-theism 123 moral responsibility 44 morality 49^50, 75 music 5^6 Mystical Theology (Denys the Areopagite) 103^4 mystics 99 Nagel, T. 52, 54, 58 naturalism 131, 137, 139; deconstructing 37^9; and empirical philosophy 17; and God of the philosophers 72^4; limitations of 38; mental/physical representations 16^18; objective/subjective knowledge/opinion 17^18; ordering/ classi¢cation of 3^4; post-modern critique of 18; reductive horizons of 18; relationship with romanticism 20; and sense experience 16^17 negative theology, and absolute alterity of God 104; concept 102^3; correlation with deconstruction/ alterity 104^5, 106, 107; Derridian 105^7; interaction of neo-Platonism/ Judaeo-Christian tradition 103^4; link with holiness, mystery, transcendence 103 neo-paganism 90^2 neo-Platonism 103 New Age 38, 89^90; and dance culture 92; and drugs 91^2; key assumptions 90; and neo-paganism 90^1, 92; selfspirituality of 90^2

249

Newbigin, L. 186 Newton, I. 58 Nietzsche, F. 82^3, 95, 97 nihilism 12^13, 14, 62, 64, 82^3, 143, 208 nominalism 70^1, 202 Norris, C. 23, 30, 42, 52 noumena 19, 75, 115 Novalis, 18 O'Connor, D.J. 21, 132 On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers (Schleiermacher) 76 onto-theology 25^6, 28, 97, 101 order-of-things 3, 11, 14, 15, 17, 19^20, 24, 28, 30, 87, 92, 167; actual 52; arche principle 72^3; and classical knowledge-based education 142; and critical realism 54; Islamic 192; knowledge of 8, 58, 61, 63, 64; and language 47; mystery of 8; our place within 49; reduced to sum of cause/ e¡ect 38; and religious education 205; ultimate 190, 231; violence at heart of 117^18 orientalism 42^3 original sin 135, 139 orthodoxy 109^10, 123; radical 116^19; trinitarian 119^22 Other 40, 97, 204, 231; construction of 42^3; God as 102^3; listening to 160^1; and morality 49^50; openness to 44, 49, 64; restoring the face of 159^60; as veiled/silent 44 Otto, R. 209^11 Outram, D. 11 Parker, S. 150^3, 154^8 Pascal, B. 74 Peperzak, A. 49 Peters, R. 130 phenomena 19, 75 phenomenology 24 phono-centrism 28^9, 30 Pickstock, C. 118^19 Placher, W.C. 70, 113 Plato 27, 103, 130^1, 160 Plotinus 103, 104 pluralism 160, 163, 174, 175 Polanyi, M. 14, 52, 61 Popper, K. 21 positivism 154^6

250

Index

post-liberalism 123; critique of 121^2; and literary metaphor 121; and living authentic Christian life 115; and rea¤rmation of trinitarian Christianity 113; and totalitarianism 116; and transformative reading of biblical text 113^15 post-modernism 85; and access to knowledge 6^7; agnosticism of 14; an/ archic freedom of 13, 25; assault on knowledge-based education 1426; and challenging/deconstructing boundaries of culture 5^6; characteristics of 37; and Chinese encyclopaedia approach 3^4, 7; closed 46^8, 51, 97; and collapsing of traditional hierarchies 5^6; commitment to desire/feeling 20; contours of 5^7; core-belief of 28; and critical judgement 5; critique of modernism 25^6, 120; critique of naturalism 18; and deconstruction of idealised human nature 145; de¢nition of 24^5; denial of objective reality/a¤rmation of mystery of life 123; diversity of response to 123; educational emancipation 8^9; e¡ect of modernism on 10^22; and establishment of non-totalitarian romantic/liberal counter-culture 44^6; evaluation of/response to 4^5, 36, 62^5; and freedom 31, 45; as historical movement 45^6; impact on religion 69; and logic of classi¢cation 3^4; as moment/condition 45, 46; negation of the past 97^8; and notion of meta-discourse 118; open 48^50, 51, 96^7; origins of 23^4; philosophical interpretation 7^8; positive pedagogy 146^7; and questions of power/authority 6^7; rejection of 35, 45; relationship with liberalism 43^4; and religious education 9; sceptism of 45; selectivity in reading of modernism 41^2; theological questions 8; and unconstrained freedom 15; and world religions 109^10 post-structuralism 30 post/pedagogy 230^1; anti-realistic 148, 149, 165; and classical pursuit of knowledge 147^8, 149; and

commitment to wisdom/critical insight 157; and concept of equality 156^7; deconstructing 154^8; and education for the good of society 149; and higher edcation 147^50; link with positivism 154^6; metaphysical/ epistemological commitments 154; and persuasion 157; and power structures 157, 158; and protection of children 157^8; and religious education 199^201, see also border pedagogy; critical education; education Postmodern Condition, The (Lyotard) 24^5 power 6^7, 31^2, 35^6; and knowledge 143^4, 146, 169^72; and religious education 204^7 Protestants 75 Pseudo-Dionysus Areopagita 103 public good 172^3 radical orthodoxy, beliefs 116^17; and critique of secular sociology 117^18; key text 117; and love 117, 118^19; origins 116 rationalism 8, 16, 19, 26, 38, 60, 138; authority of 28; contingent 57^60; as measure of reality 96 re/enchantment 8, 99, 109, 123; as celebration of agnosticism 108; as disguised atheistic meta-narrative 108; and post-liberalism 113; and recovery of mystery 100; and theological orthodoxy 107^8 realism 167; access to 57; as ¢ctional creation 48; holistic view of 54; and language 47; mind-independent 53; and openness to alterity, di¡erence, voice of Other 49^50; and our place within it 54; reason as measure of 96; scepticism concerning present view of 49; self-creating/self-sustaining 72^3; and the universe 53^4, see also antirealism Reardon, B.M.G. 76 religious education, anti-realism/ religious understanding 201^4; confessional 181; contextual 195^8; critical 220^31; cultural aspects 196^7; and cultural diversity 216^17; deconstructing 195^207; and denial of

Index progress through study of religion 202^3; dimensional/experiential modes 182; and dissipating tension between truth claims 192; dual system 205^6; and economies of power 204^7; and the Enlightenment 197; and expansion of faith community schools 205; focus on concrete/ particular 196; freedom/tolerance 191^4; and history 181, 203, 204; and holistic model of human development 196; and identity 196; justi¢cation of 215^16; learning about religion 183^6; learning-from-religion 186^90; legitimation/accommodation 181^3; and locally agreed syllabus 206; and marginalisation of religion 182; modern response to 182; naturalistic/ romantic dualism 182, 194; nominalist/essentialist choice 202; and order-of-things 205; and politics of di¡erence 214^19; post/pedagogical paradigm 199^201; and private spiritualities 192; proscribed content for 206; and pupil competence 197^8; purpose of 198; and question of ultimate truth 185; revealed/inner relationship 183^4; so-called neutrality of 185^6; and striving after minority voice 207; and suspicion of the spiritual 213^14; synthesis of 220^1; transcendence/immanence friction 191; transcendent 208^12; transformative 209, 212^14, 216, 218^19; universalist approach 184; utilisation of phenomenology 184^5 religious experience 187^8, 189, 190, 209^10; authentic 80; centrality of 80; contradictory beliefs 80; ethical agnostic form 80^1; expressive 76^7, 80; ¢rst hand 75; human/ transcendent di¡erence 77, 79; imperialist view 81; personal/abstract 74, 80; as personally created 85; pluralism of 79^81; prophetic 210^11; romantic 74^8; rooted in reality beyond natural world 210; and the sacred 211; through practical reason 75^6; transcendent aspects 211^12; and the voice within 210 Renaissance 11, 32 Reynolds, S. 91

251

Ricoeur, P. 115, 204, 211 Robinson, J. 83 Roman Catholics 19 romanticism 18^19; advantages of 19; and aesthetic, moral, spiritual sensibility 19^20; deconstructing 39^41; and education 136^9; failures of 19^20; relationship with naturalism 20; and religious experience 74^8 Rorty, R. 16, 38^9, 42, 44 Rousseau, J.-J. 18, 127, 137, 138^9, 144, 145 Said, E. 42, 43, 110 Sarup, M. 29 Saussure, F. de 29^30 scepticism 52^3, 58, 170 Schapio, H.S. 139 Sche¥er, I. 39 Schlegel, 18 Schleiermacher, F.D.E. 76^7, 215 science 17, 18, 21, 58^9, 129, 131, 168; blindness to moral/spiritual questions 27^8; marginalisation of 38^9; theoretical/practical success of 37 Scolnicov, S. 27 Sea of Faith Network 89 secularism 117^18 self-spirituality, experience is not what it should be 90; and the inner realm 90; salvation through techniques, rituals, pseudo-technology 90 sense/sensibility relationship 39, 60, 137, 189^90 Shakespeare, S. 116, 119 Shakespeare, W. 72 Shklar, J. 42 Silberstein, L.J. 43, 112 simulation 47 Smart, N. 185 Smith, A. and Webster, F. 148 Smith, J.W.D. 183, 184 Socrates 160 Spade, P.V. 11 Spener, P. 75 Spinoza, B. 19 spirituality 56 structuralism 24, 30 student riots (May 1968) 23^4 subjectivity 40, 41, 121 Surin, K. 188 suspicion 14^15, 16, 85

252

Index

Sutherland, S. 33 Swann Report (1985) 191 Tanner, K.E. 113 Taylor, C. 15, 31, 36, 52 Taylor, M.C. 86^9, 93, 95, 123 text, biblical 113^15; and death of the author 30^1, 35; deconstruction of 32^6; open/closed 88^9; phonocentric 28^9; post-modern 29^31; post-structural 30; re-reading of book as 88^9; replacement of one with another 106; understanding 33^4 textbooks 142^3 Thatcher, A. 213^14 theology, challenge to exclusivity 78^80; classical 77, 81; cognitive/ propositional 114, 122; cultural/ linguistic 114^15; Derridian 105^8; disengagement from philosophy 101; erring 86^9; experiential/expressive 76^7, 80, 114; faith/reason relationship 73^4; faith/ understanding relationship 72; God/ humanity relationship 69^72; inclusion in modern university 215; liberal/universal 78^81; medieval 70; modern era 70^1; negative 102^5, 106; romantic 74^8; and understanding of self 71^2 Thiemann, R.F. 114 Thoughts Concerning Education (Locke) 134^5 Tillich, P. 72, 83, 100 Tindal, M. 73 Toland, J. 73 tolerance 21, 41, 42, 63, 80, 134, 136, 139; and religious education 191^4 Torrance, T.F. 20, 131 totalitarianism 13, 21^2, 25, 40, 62, 63, 121; avoidance of 44; and postliberalism 116

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Wittgenstein) 18 trinitarian orthodoxy 11, 71, 119^22 truth 33, 39, 41, 61, 84^5, 86; coherence theory of 19; in critical religious education 225^6, 227, 230; pursuit of 120^1, 166, 172, 209, 216; ultimate 185, 190; universal 24 universe 57^8, 72, 137, 142 University of Berlin 215 Usher, R. and Edwards, R. 141, 146 utopia 39, 40 value concepts/systems 17^18, 20, 39, 45, 131^2 vegetable kingdom 3 veri¢cation principle 17 Voltaire, F.M. de A. 73 Ward, G. 45, 94, 95, 116, 119 Wernick, A. 110 White, J. 133^4 Whit¢eld, G. 75 Wiggershaus, R. 52 William of Ockham 11^12, 70^1, 74, 209 Williams, B. 38, 52 Williams, R. 94, 107 Wilson, J. 187 wisdom 60^2, 63; in critical religious education 224^5, 227, 229^30 Wittgenstein, L. 18, 122^3 Wollaston, I. 111 Wolterstor¡, N. 176, 193 world wide web 7, 25 world-view 22, 24, 38, 172^3, 199, 216 Wright, A. 177, 199, 209 Yates, P. 192 Yoder, J.H. 115 Zionism 112^13